The Protect The Bush Administration Act

So far the House has defied Bush on telecom immunity. Those left right wingers over at CATO have been explaining why they should continue to do so. The current FISA act gives the government all the power it needs to wiretap people it should be wiretapping while making it difficult to wiretap those it shouldn't be. The Bush administration doesn't want the telecoms to go to court because it was wiretapping groups or individuals it shouldn't have. The New York Times finally gets it:
The Intelligence Cover-Up

For more than two years now, Congress, the news media, current and former national security officials, think tanks and academic institutions have been engaged in a profound debate over how to modernize the law governing electronic spying to keep pace with technology. We keep hoping President Bush will join in.

Instead, the president offers propaganda intended to scare Americans, expand his powers, and erode civil liberties — and to ensure that no one is held to account for the illegal wiretapping he ordered after 9/11.
Consider last Thursday’s performance, as the House debated a sound bill that closes some technology gaps in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and gives government agencies new flexibility to eavesdrop, but preserves constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Mr. Bush distorted the contents of the bill and threatened to veto it.

He accused House leaders of “putting in place a cumbersome court approval process that would make it harder to collect intelligence on foreign terrorists.” Actually, the bill merely ensures that special judges continue to supervise surveillance of American citizens. The “cumbersome process” is really a court that acts swiftly and has refused only a half-dozen of more than 21,000 wiretap requests in its nearly 30 years of existence.

What Mr. Bush wants is to be able to listen to your international telephone calls and read your international e-mail whenever he wants, without a court being able to prevent it or judge the legality of his actions.

Of course the real problem is the administration has already broken the law and that law breaking will see the light of day if the telecoms are taken to court.

Finally, Mr. Bush said it was vital to national security to give amnesty to any company that turned over data on Americans without a court order. The purpose of this amnesty is not to protect national secrets — that could be done during a trial — but to make sure that the full damage to Americans’ civil liberties is never revealed. Mr. Bush also objects to a provision that would create a committee to examine his warrantless spying program.

Mr. Bush wanted the House to approve the Senate’s version of the bill, which includes Mr. Bush’s amnesty and does not do nearly as good a job of preserving Americans’ rights. We were glad the House ignored his bluster. If the Senate cannot summon the courage and good sense to follow suit, there is no rush to pass a law.

The president will continue to claim the country is in grave danger over this issue, but it is not. The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.

Over at CATO Timothy B. Lee quotes comments by that left wing agitator Willaim Safire when the original FISA bill was passed in 1978.

Predictably, opponents of warrantless wiretapping cheered; the act seems to require a court warrant before tapping can begin. But nobody is reading the fine print, which adds up to the most sweeping authorization for the increase and abuse of wiretapping and bugging in our history.

Conservatives like to assist law enforcement, and to curtail espionage; we do not like to make it harder for “our side.” But this natural inclination to help the law must be outweighed by a responsibility to protect the law-abiding individual from the power of government to intrude. And this bill would turn every telephone instrument in every home into a suspected household spy.

Huey Long once said that if fascism ever came to America, it would come in Democratic form; in this bill, Big Brother is on the way, and he is cloaked in the mantle of civil liberties.

Lee continues:

Since Safire wrote those words, FISA has been repeatedly amended to further reduce judicial oversight of eavesdropping, most importantly with the Patriot Act in October 2001. The law on the books in early 2006 was even more permissive than the legislation Safire is blasted as an assault on civil liberties. Yet the Bush administration has been so successful at shifting the terms of the debate that even a lot of self-described civil libertarians are conceding that FISA still places too many restrictions on domestic wiretapping activities. The debate is now between a House bill that further waters down judicial oversight over Americans’ international communications and a Senate bill that virtually eliminates judicial oversight of international calls.

One of the lessons here, I think, is that civil liberties won’t be preserved through compromise. The partisans of ever-increasing executive power aren’t likely to go away any time soon. If Congress compromises and agrees to further expand executive wiretapping powers, a future president will come back to Congress and argue that the law is still too restrictive and still more compromises are needed. President Clinton did it in the 1990s. President Bush is doing it now. At some point, Congress just has to say no.

I hope that the House members will read that last paragraph over and over.

One of the lessons here, I think, is that civil liberties won’t be preserved through compromise.

So who are the Fascists?

Many of my Republican friends criticize McCain as a leftist. I can see the point. But we ought not be too quick to believe that all forms of anti-libertarian ideology are leftist. We need to recognize that there is a form of non-leftist statism of a very distinct kind. It is not socialist in the traditional sense. It believes in a corporate state, combined with protectionism and belligerence in foreign policy. The right-wing predecessors here are Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, and the name of the ideology is fascism.
~Lew Rockwell

The first person to compare the Bush Republican Party to Hitler and Mussolini was not a leftists but a Republican - the former assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts. Libertarian Lew Rockwell continues that comparison today in:

Triumph of the Red-State Fascists.

Rockwell begins with a discussion of the precursor to today's Republican Party, the red-baiters of the 50s.

Murray Rothbard used to tell the story of speaking to conservative and Republican audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There would be large groups gathered for various talks on economics and politics. He would give a lecture on the problem of price controls, or protectionism, or high taxes. People really liked what he had to say. They would clap, and learn from his lecture.

Then he would sit down. At some point in the course of the conference, the appointed anti-communist speaker would rise to the podium. He would decry the evil of Russia and its atheistic system of government. He would call for beefing up nuclear weapons and hint darkly of the necessity of war. He would end with an apocalyptic statement about the need for everyone to completely dedicate themselves to eradicating the communists by any means necessary. No talk of limiting or cutting government; quite the opposite.

So how would these people, who clapped for Murray, respond to the warmonger? Insanely, wildly, uncontrollably. They would stand and scream and yell and cheer, getting up on their chairs and putting their hands together high in the air. The applause would go on for five minutes and more, and the speaker would be later mauled for autographs. His books would sell wildly.

Meanwhile, poor Murray would stand there in alarm. How could these same people cheer both a call for liberty and a call for empire, and, most notably, give their hearts over to the maniacal nationalist while being merely polite to a call for the same liberty that had led this party to oppose FDR's domestic and foreign-policy? It was experiences like these that led him to write the most important dissection of the Republican party ever to appear: The Betrayal of the American Right. It is here that Murray engages in a deep, soul-searching look at his own role in red-baiting in the 1950s. He had hoped to use the anti-communist movement to educate people about the need for freedom.

That was fifty years ago but it was easy for them to make the switch from anti-communist militarism to anti-Islamic imperialism. He then takes on Bill Kristol:

Republicans are prepared to push this agenda, altered to fit the American political context, in this election. Their number one tactic to retain power is impugning the patriotism of Barack Obama. It seems like a puzzle, but an opinion piece by William Kristol in the New York Times offers a clue into the basis of the Republican campaign. He first makes a big deal out of the fact that Obama used to wear an American flag pin on his coat, but now no longer does so. He drags this up as if to accuse him of disloyalty to the American cause.

It is hard to imagine a more brainless and low-level tactic than to harp on such things. It compares only to the periodic campaigns by Republicans on the issue of flag burning, as if whether a person burns a privately owned flag has any bearing at all on the well-being of the country. But then Kristol goes further into the depths of depravity by attempting to paint Obama's wife as guilty of treason for saying that she is proud of America "for the first time in my adult lifetime." By citing these words, he is implying that she is an America hater.

Now, what buttons is Kristol trying to push here? It is the now familiar fascist theme: loyalty to the nation state and its wars must be the first and only test of worthiness to serve in public office. Folks, this is a cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is very likely to mutate into a full storm. Sad to say, the Republican faithful, the same people that were stupid enough to vote for McCain, will probably go for it.

How I recall those heady days of the 1970s, when everyone said that the move of the neoconservatives into the Republican party portended a raising of the intellectual level. Quite the reverse. These people are taking things straight into the gutter, where they had already been tending since the late 1950s.

So the Libertarians - the "paleocons" can see the reality of today's Republican Party but can the Democrats see it clearly enough to fight it?

Fascism

Matt Yglesias is reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism so we don't have to. His reaction is it's just silly.

One major problem with the book is that Goldberg has no ability whatsoever to stick to a coherent line of argument. You might call this book "disparate essays about fascism and American liberalism designed to annoy liberals." He doesn't seem to care about what his various claims amount to or even whether or not they're inconsistent. Thus, sometimes liberals are too mean to the non-Hitler fascists of the world. Other times, the problem is that people on the left in the 1920s were, at the time, unduly soft on fascism. But other times the problem is that people on the left now have views on some subjects (e.g., the importance of public health) that are similar to views fascists had back in the day.

So who are the fascists? The term fascism was authored by Benito Mussolini. So how did he define it?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”

Sounds a lot like the current Republican party to me.

In 1944 Vice President Henry Wallace defined fascism in a New York Times editorial.

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

And what about the American fascist?

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

Does that sound familiar - it should over 60 years later.

Quote of the day

Sully hits a bulls eye with this one so the entire post is the quote of the day.

Since the Bush right insists that Robertson is completely irrelevant to the current GOP, I have no idea why they are fixated by his endorsement of Giuliani. For me, however, it seals the deal. Robertson blamed Americans for causing 9/11. He is a charlatan and a religious phony. He has enriched himself at the expense of millions of gullible Christians who did not understand that this man's sole principle is his own power and wealth. It doesn't surprise me that he sees eye to eye with Giuliani. They are very similar characters. But he does represent what may be becoming the consensus among Christianists: that the war on Islamic terrorism is the prime issue; and that the way to tackle it is by increasing military aggression, bombing or occupying Muslim countries, preserving Israel solely to hasten the Apocalypse, and entrenching torture as a pillar of American national security policy. The fusion of Giuliani's authoritarianism with Robertson's Christianism is indeed one future path for the GOP. It is enlightening to me to witness two very similar politicians sink their differences to forge that new, fascistic direction.

The bold is mine.

Bush's Brown Shirts

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
~Sinclair Lewis

It has been almost three years since conservative Republican Paul Craig Roberts wrote The Brownshirting of America where he discussed how the Bush cultists resembled the brown shirted cultists of Aldoph Hitler.

Bush’s supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US – truths now firmly established by the Bush administration’s own reports – as treasonous America-bashing.

William Norman Grigg points out the Bush brown shirts are now even closer to Hitler's brown shirted cultists.
The Reich Wing: Bush-Era Conservatism as Reductio Ad Absurdum

As the Iraq war ripens into the largest strategic catastrophe in our nation's history, dead-enders among the Bu'ushist faithful confront a sobering question. No, that question is not how to extricate our nation from the Mesopotamian morass, but rather how to deal with internal dissent.

It's really quite simple, sighed 35-year-old Hillary-Ann, a professional woman from California with sufficient disposable income to drop at least $1,200 to spend a week confined on a cruise ship with the editorial staff of National Review.

"Of course, we need to execute some of these people ... [a] few of these prominent people who are trying to demoralize the country," she commented with languid indifference as she waded waist-deep in the Pacific. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get. Then things'll change."

So what's with someone like Hillary-Ann? The same thing that drove the personality type that became Hitler's brown shirts. If you want to understand this phenomenon, and you should if you want to fight it, you need to read Robert Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians. And the price is right - all you have to do is download a pdf and read it. We all know what Hitler's brown shirts enabled so we all need to think about how to stop the Bush/Cheney brown shirts.

Harvey and the moron

Digby and Glenn Greenwald have both discussed Harvey Harvard Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield's May 2 Wall Street Journal essay “The Case for the Strong Executive”. William Norman Grigg also looks at this shocking op ed today in
Neoconservative Fascism

Mansfield, who unblushingly admits that the alternative to the rule of law is "tyranny," insists that the "defects" of our system of liberty under law suggest "the need for one-man rule."

Seriously. He really wrote those words. And he apparently meant them.

He likewise maintains that the rule of law "is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot."

This presumably would be true of our incumbent tyrant, an individual who displays no symptoms of either intelligence or wisdom.


To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, Mansfield – who is making his bid to become the neo-conservative Giovanni Gentile – is the first American public intellectual of consequence to offer the unflinching declaration, by way of an op-ed in a prominent mainstream periodical, that the rule of law is disposable – and that the “executive power” supposedly embodied in the president exists apart from the law.

Mansfield refers to the struggle between “the strong executive and its adversary, the rule of law” – a formulation that cannot co-exist with the constitutional mandate (which is also cited by the professor) that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If the executive is an adversary of the law, how can he carry out the function of enforcing it?

Like John C. Yoo and other exponents of unlimited executive power in the Bush Regime, Mansfield believes that the president draws his power not from the Constitution but from “Necessity” – or, as Machiavelli (whose dubious authority the professor repeatedly invokes) puts it, la necessita che non da tempo (“the necessity that allows no time”).

In times of crisis, therefore, the president, as head of the “energetic” branch of government, can exercise plenary power, at least according to Mansfield's model. In this he would certainly be in agreement with the energetic chief executive who seized extraordinary powers to February 28, 1933 to deal with a crisis precipitated by the burning of Germany's Reichstag Building.

As if Mansfield's opinion wasn't shocking enough it is even more shocking if one looks at the incoherent babbling moron he would have be the tyrant. Eugene Robinson attempts to document just how moronic Mansfield's would be tyrant is in
Lost in the Fog With Commander Guy

That Ohio appearance generated so many new Bushisms that it's hard to know where to begin. Asked about the polls showing the unpopularity of the war and his own low approval rating, Bush said, "I've been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times." Asked about immigration, Bush said, "There are jobs Americans aren't doing. . . . If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about."

Um, sure, Mr. President, we follow you. All the way to the chicken factory.

Those in the crowd at Tipp City also learned from the president that Iraq is definitely not another Vietnam. But the president added, "There are some similarities, of course -- death is terrible."

Okay, I know that most of the president's off-the-wall locutions are dangerous only to the English language. But to the extent that carelessness of speech reflects carelessness of mind, much more is at stake. The Commander Guy's rationale for sending more U.S. troops to fight and die in Iraq is as elusive as his reason for starting the war in the first place. He says his goal is victory, but he can't explain coherently what victory would look like, much less how to get there.

[.....]

Speaking to the contractors' group Wednesday, the president elaborated: "Either we'll succeed or we won't succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that's what we're trying to achieve."

What is the man talking about? What "parts of our own country" experience violence remotely comparable to that in Iraq? Is he serious?

President Bush now says that even after "success" in Iraq -- after more American and Iraqi deaths -- there will still be sectarian violence and there will still be suicide bombers killing innocent civilians. Which is the situation right now. So why stay in Iraq even one more day, except to validate the unwise decisions of our ineloquent Commander Guy?

OK Professor Mansfield, is this really the one man rule you want? Do you really want this moron to be above the law?

A slide toward tyranny?

On the left we have had David Neiwert talking about a slide into fascism under the Bush/Cheney administration. But the left isn't the only side that's noticed, so has the Libertarian right. In the American Conservative we had Hunger for Dictatorship by Scott McConnell.

And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all-that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.

And there is the always shrill Dr Paul Craig Roberts who talks about the Brownshirting of America. Joe Conason is the latest to explain It could happen here .

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

Of course it's no coincidence that the ghost of Richard Nixon should appear now. The Nixon and Bush administration have a common personality, Dick (the Lord of Darkness) Cheney. From his earliest days a firm believer in the President as all powerful tyrant. In this case however of course the president is only a puppet now and Dick Cheney is the one pulling the strings.