It’s oath-inducing enough when officeholders break their oaths of office. But there can be no greater insolence than an officeholder who denies knowledge of what his oath was.

The President…shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

–U.S. Constitution

I do solemnly swear that I will…to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

–Richard Nixon, 1968 and 1972

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

–Richard Nixon, 1977

Nixon’s long, painful decent from the Oval Office was marked by the constant assertions of The President’s Men that their loyalty to him overrode all other considerations, including legality, and that they considered this the height of honor. Interestingly, their oath of office is to uphold the Constitution and doesn’t even mention the president, while laws were already on the books that required of them outright disobedience to illegal orders. “Loyalty to the president” isn’t mentioned anywhere, although the fact that the laws allow the president to fire members of his government at will certainly explains where it comes from.

In our own time, the Nixon Doctrine of presidential lawlessness is being used far more vigorously than Tricky Dick ever would have dared. From signing statements to illegal search and seizure to cruel and unusual punishment to forced self-incrimination, Bush’s “anti-terrorism” campaign has ripped out so many parts of the Constitution he swore to preserve, they should probably just issue an abridged edition to save paper.

In the latest in a long train of usurpations, Bush has ordered staffers Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten, and Sara Taylor to refuse to answer questions and provide documents demanded by Congress. Such orders from more traditional presidents would only be exposed after a lengthy investigation, but Bush has come right out and done it in the open. According to the dark hints of James Comey, whatever they’re hiding is so extreme that that guardian angel of civil liberties, John Ashcroft himself, was ready to resign in 2004 if they didn’t stop it, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials.

The greatest prophet of the sixteenth century might actually not have been Nostradamus but Shakespeare:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office…

What Hamlet is trying to account for with his great speech, in his princely, flowery language, is why everybody doesn’t just off themselves, given how cruddy everything is. The political trends of the past few years lend renewed significance to this question–especially when it comes to the oath of office.

Consider Keith Ellison, the freshman Democratic congressman from Minnesota who was trashed late last year after he announced he’d be taking his oath on the Koran. His Republican colleague Virgil Goode, who serves a district in an area of Virginia that has been a bastion of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paranoia since the nation began, warned against more Muslims coming into the country and electing more Muslims to Congress. Goode also commented, “I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” In an op-ed, with admirably unintentional irony, he called on Americans to “save Judeo-Christian values” to avoid “leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion.”

Bush refused to criticize Goode’s overt anti-Muslim bigotry–”no judgments have been made,” Bush spokesman Dana Perino explained. But Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to play the good cop for the GOP, distancing himself from Goode’s remarks:

“Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? …I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I’m glad he’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith.”

Unfortunately, what Graham says here is both a deliberate deceit Read the rest of this entry »

What a sorry-looking bunch of anal-retentive malcontents.

Libertarianism was the darling ideology of the nineties — a decade when bread-and-butter progressivism was considered oh-so-passe. Nothing beats it if you want to pose as a rebel without ruffling any feathers within the corporate world order.

The attraction libertarianism has for a good many liberals either indicates their ignorance or is very revealing about their true politics. But it isn’t sufficient to denounce libertarianism on the grounds that, “I’m a liberal/progressive/leftist, so I’m for government.” Left/right isn’t pro/anti-government, and the libertarian promise to get the government out of your life is a lie.

Under libertarianism, when you sign a work contract that does not protect you in any way because you need to put food on the table, get injured on a job with no safety rules, get fired with no recourse, get evicted with no advance notice, and try to sneak your family onto someone’s property to get a night’s sleep, you’ll find out in a hurry how the government “stays out of your life” — just as soon as the cops get there.

What a libertarian government stays out of is protecting people against anything short of outright bodily assault. It is property that libertarianism is really designed to protect, and to that end, a libertarian government is just as mean as it is lean — small in size, but as ruthless and violent as any other government, with fewer restraints.

For most people, libertarian “economic freedom” simply means wage slavery.

Of course — people will point out — this stuff is already true under capitalism. Quite so, with some qualifications. It’s strange that some people think this is an argument in libertarianism’s favor.

Libertarianism takes capitalism in all its inequality and oppressiveness and makes it harsher and more absolute. It attacks every restraint imposed on capitalism by workers, consumers, environmentalists, political parties, and so forth, in the name of an absolutist version of property rights and contractual obligations that, although stated in terms that sound equal and fair, is actually ultra-favorable to the rich — those who already have property and are already in a good contractual bargaining position.

I mean, think about it…suppose you were living in a medieval village with standards of hygiene that were, well, medieval. To avoid the filthy streets, would you prefer to live inside the outhouse? Maybe you would, if you’d lived in filth for so long you thought shit was good for you.

Who knows…people are strange. If you can believe shit is good for you, you might even believe capitalism’s good for you.

The rest of us can hope for indoor plumbing. Or socialism — an almost forgotten concept no government ever tried to implement. (The name socialism, of course, used to be very popular in some parts of the world.) Or, if that’s too much for you, stitch up the social safety net, and keep your needles out — because the capitalists are going to keep ripping it open every chance they get.

Here’s somebody who comes out of academia — and so do I! Now, I may not be the most pro-academic person in the world (to put it mildly), but I do appreciate good academics. That’s why I was tentatively excited when I found out about Feldman’s Frameshop, in which he dissects the way issues are framed so as to advantage conservatism…very much in line with my own blend of media criticism and discourse analysis, very interesting, potentially very good. I even used and linked to some of his material the other day.

I got a little worried when I read the sample chapter from Feldman’s book and found out his glowing reaction to Teddy Roosevelt’s 1906 “Muck Rake” speech, in which the president attacked the bulldogs who were too persistently pointing out America’s failings. Old Teddy had — and in some circles apparently still has — a greatly exaggerated reputation as a progressive. He did do some trustbusting and supported some health and safety regulations, but behind the scenes he was generally quite pro-corporate. He was also a ferocious racist and imperalist. His “Muck Rake” speech, which gave us the word “muckraker,” showed the true colors of a sunshine liberal — sure, criticize abuses, but not too much. Feldman turns this into an inspiring moral message on some elevated plane of little relevance to the actual politics of the time — or of any time.

But what really threw me was this ringing defense of deliberative censorship. In the midst of a post in which Feldman performs the admittedly worthy task of shredding Bill O’Reilly, he chides Mad Bill for accusing DailyKos of fostering “9/11 conspiracy theories”:

According to the FAQ free and open for every human being and Bill O’Reilly to read, The DailyKos adheres to a strict editorial policy whereby posting a 9/11 conspiracy diaries results not only in the deletion of the diary, but the banning of the offending writers from the site. Write a 9/11 conspiracy diary on DailyKos and within hours, your diary,and every other diary you ever wrote, is deleted and your a free account is canceled.

More importantly, O’Reilly failed to report how a volunteer team of DailyKos “trusted users” constantly sifts through every diary posted to make sure the site does not step across that murky line dividing civil debate from violent rhetoric. They accomplish this through a combination of requests to writers to clean up foul language and–occasionally–by “bleeping out” offensive words (e.g., O’Reilly is full of ***t). If nasty words do make are kept in a post, it is typically because they are a key to the story (e.g., the story of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers sending death threats to the owner of The DailyKos). These trusted users do not get paid, they simply believe in DailyKos’s patriotic mission of fostering free and open debate. In the end, then, even though YearlyKos is distinct from DailyKos, JetBlue should be proud of any perceived ties this gives them to The DailyKos–a blog that historians will someday credit with helping to revive deliberative democracy in America.

The hypocrisy here is a clear indication that Feldman has learned a little too much from studying Republican framing — like Saruman researching the rings too long.

After the above quote, Feldman castigates O’Reilly for allowing Dinesh D’Souza to promote his own “9/11 conspiracy theory.” D’Souza’s latest cerebral hemorrhage is that the “cultural left” caused 9/11.

Like well-trained CIA liberals of the Cold War era denouncing both fascism and communism in the same breath (see MORE THOUGHTS below), Feldman wants to make very clear that he rejects both “9/11 conspiracy theories” that blame the U.S. government AND those that blame the left. Instead, he takes a sensible, moderate, reasonable, unideological position in the middle — that it was a conspiracy done by Arabs. The great advantage of saying that Arabs plotted the meticulous conspiracy is, of course, that this isn’t a conspiracy theory. Only if some prominent group of Americans or American allies were the alleged conspirators would it be a conspiracy theory. (If this seems at all an unorthodox statement, just check the way the term “conspiracy theory” is in fact routinely used.)

The kind of “deliberative democracy” Feldman wants is the same one that has murdered people by the millions overseas for the last sixty years — while debating at home how to take our unchallengeable supremacy in the practice of democracy to an even higher pitch of perfection.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New 9/11 Casualties is a horrifying story about what happened to the rescue workers at Ground Zero — more particularly, what happened to their lungs. It’s a very good piece, with the exception of a brief but necessary wave to I.C. — Imperial Correctness. I.C. dictates that the American Empire can make mistakes and (it’s now being whispered) even be callous or downright scandalous in its behavior, but never EVER would it take the lead role in perpetrating atrocities — still less against its own people. That this is provably false from the historical record is not the point; nor will you persuade the willing upholders of I.C. that they are merely saying what Big Daddy tells them to. They can quite rightly point to the fact that they don’t always believe Big Daddy. Big Daddy, the national security state, might, indeed, be wrong. But if he did certain things, he would simply cease to BE Big Daddy, and that is NOT acceptable.

The brief but necessary wave consists of the following bit of disinfo about the Twin Towers, so transparent it might almost be a good thing:

“The weight of the buildings pulverized everything inside—including thousands of tons of insulation, drywall, concrete, glass, plastics, 50,000 computers and other pieces of office equipment—into a fine powder.”

Now how would it do that, I wonder? If you shot all that material out of a cannon and it hit a steel wall in mid-air, it wouldn’t all turn into a fine powder. It would require an incredibly high impact velocity to completely powderize even concrete, let alone all the other materials. This is perhaps the single strongest piece of evidence for controlled demolition, and it’s right out in the open. It’s amazing how people can know about this and still believe the official story. It was precisely when I heard about the powderization, three and a half years ago, that I stopped thinking an inside job was a little too much to believe and remembered Sherlock Holmes’ injunction, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

However improbable — however unacceptable — however world-shattering.

UPDATE: I forgot to point out the most interesting aspect of the New Gravity (a concept every bit as sound as the Third Way, the End of History, and the New American Century). Not only is gravity stronger, it’s much faster than it was before. In fact, the new, improved gravity works in advance…objects now pulverize while falling, BEFORE THEY EVEN HIT THE GROUND. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this photo of the North Tower midway through the process of collapsing — or, more precisely, of blowing apart:

read more…

Or rather, candiDATE, with no ’s.’ Tom Tancredo, R-Col., is the sole Republican candidate to address the NAACP convention. He was flanked by lecterns with placards for nine other GOP candidates — all no-shows. Every invited Democrat showed up.

As Jeffrey Feldman remarks, “One has to wonder why this photo was not the lead on every morning show and on the front pages of every morning newspaper in America.”