The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: politics

  • Health of the Republic: Down 10% to 15%

    With exactly 18 months left to go in office, this President has made a sweeping and unprecedented play for unchecked power. According to a Washington Post article, the President intends to claim that Congress cannot pursue its investigation into the political firing of 9 US Attorneys, because the President has exerted a broad “executive privilege” that (he claims) exempts his former underlings from testifying. By statute, enforcement of a contempt-of-Congress citation is handled through the Department of Justice, which must convene a grand jury on the matter. According to the Bush faction, because the Justice Department is a part of the executive branch and because Bus claims that the executive branch is “unitary” (an untried and abominable constitutional theory), the DoJ cannot take action that doesn’t conform to the “will” of the President.

    Let that sink in there. Our government is now to be determined by the “emanations of the will of the President” — not by, say, the laws on the books (which clearly mandate that the DoJ pursue any contempt-of-Congress charge sent to it). One scholar called the attempted power grab “almost Nixonian in its scope and breadth of interpreting its power”. It’s time to stop pussy-footing around. This makes Nixon look like a little child. Even Nixon recognized that there were some checks on Presidential power; the Bush White House feels there are none.

    More below the fold.
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  • Re-cap on the posters

    It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! 🙂 — to collect them in one place.

    More below the fold.
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  • Shameless me-tooism

    Generally, I don’t like posting a simple link to someone else. But today, I feel compelled, because Glenn Greenwald has done such a masterful job outlining the facts and the reasons behind the catastrophic collapse of American support throughout the world. We’ve allowed this President and his cronies to change what America is, and we’ve allowed him to taint how the world views us. And whether or not you take any moral guidance from the rest of humanity, you have to ask yourself this: If the “war on terror” is a globe-spanning, decade-spanning epic struggle for the survival of civilization itself … wouldn’t it be an easier fight if most of the world was on our side? Why would you go out and deliberately antagonize potential allies?

    The only answer I can see is: You’d do that if you were infected with hyper-machismo that views alliances as “soft” and “weak” — the sort of testosterone poisoning that follows naturally when one feels subconscious but unavoidable guilt over dodging an earlier war’s call to service.

  • Scooter Libby and the Rule of Law

    OK, first off, what the President did — commuting Libby’s sentence so that he serves no jail time — is itself well within the law. Perhaps unwisely, the Founders did vest that power in the President and he gets to use it, even when it’s unseemly. Let’s leave that aside.

    But if the President thinks Libby has been mistreated, why only commute the sentence? Why not pardon him outright? In the next few days, I predict you’ll see an apparent division in the rightwing noise machine. Don’t fall for it — it’s a sham. More below the fold.
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  • Irksome metric

    Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:

    Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.

    “The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.

    Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.

  • Another criminal escapes justice on a technicality

    Interestingly, that’s not how the right-wing noise machine is approaching this story, about how some of the indictments against Tom DeLay have been thrown out. You’d think that people who have spent literally four decades decrying “judicial activism” and unjust outcomes of people “clearly” guilty, would be a-twitter that a judge and then an appeals court threw out the indictments on a technical point.

    In fact, however, people at, say, the National Review think this post-facto justifies Mr. DeLay and makes it almost criminal that he was forced to step down as House Majority Leader. We should all cry for Mr. DeLay, apparently. Except of course — as even the more-friendly Houston Chronicle article is forced to admit — Mr. DeLay still faces charges of laundering money and of committing conspiracy to launder money. Those were crimes at the time (Illegal to launder money? Who knew?) — and he may still face trial on them.

    The guys at the National Review take this as evidence that “the charges seem to be falling apart”, but that seems a tad over-optimistic based on the articles I’ve seen. The dismissal came because the crime Mr. DeLay was alleged to have committed didn’t come into force until 2003, whereas his disreputable actions happened in 2002 and before. It seems the courts had little choice on this one — though I’d love to know what prosecutor Ron Erle had in mind when he pressed the charges in the first place. I doubt this is as open-and-shut as it seems. All that notwithstanding, the other charges are not hobbled by the same calendar problem. Money laundering and conspiracy have been on the books as crimes for quite some time now.

    Though the Review article would have you believe that the dismissals taint the other indictments, in fact, the only reason that Mr. DeLay has not faced trial yet is that the presiding judge opted to wait until the appeal of indictments was complete.

    Has “the Hammer” been vindicated? Hardly.

  • The Appeal of Apocalypse

    What is so seductive about the end of the world?

    Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of the dice. Preachers orate, as they always have, of the coming of hellfire. Books like Left Behind are runaway best-sellers.

    Why is it that we are drawn to the end of the world? More below the fold.

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  • Are you safer?

    In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things that are true or good. We are safer, Mr. Cohen asserts, and we should be willing to say or hear this.

    Problem is, he’s flat out wrong. More below the fold.

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  • Ubi Dubium

    There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi libertas”, or, “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”)

  • Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

    Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the strict timetables that led to his veto of the previous ones.

    I make no secret of the fact that I fall on the political left and that I believe this Administration is, very likely, the Very Worst Ever. I think it’s time to end this war and to begin healing the massive wounds that have been dealt to our prestige abroad, our civil liberties at home, and indeed the very soul of our democracy. I would support, without reservation, a move to impeach this President for abuse of his office and betrayal of the American people and, worse, the betrayal of core American principles that have made this nation a beacon of hope for humanity.

    So naturally enough, the blogs I read and the people I pay attention to have been in a furor over the recent decision by the Democratic Party leadership. Outraged, and shocked, and hurt, these commentators lament that the Democrats “caved in” to the President and handed him his first legislative victory since November. It will be taken, they say, as a sign of weakness. I felt the same visceral revulsion, the same sense of abandonment, when I realized that the timetable-stripped bill was the one that would reach the President’s desk. After that mind-blowing adrenaline high of sweeping Congress, of finally getting real oversight going, this did seem like a crash back to the dark depths of the Bush supremacy, circa 2004. I did feel that the leadership let me down.

    And yet…
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