6 January 2006

It is dictatorship

Jonathan Schell pens a scathing assessment of the Bush presidency and his proclivity for declaring himself unbounded by any law of the land, his abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. From support of torture to the wholesale secret indefinite incarceration of American citizens.
There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret.

The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff has called a "cabal." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported the same thing. Cabinet meetings were for show. Real decisions were made elsewhere, out of sight. Another White House official, John DiIulio, has commented that there was "a complete lack of a policy apparatus" in the White House. "What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm." As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were made.

With Bush's defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, "Yes, I am above the law--I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is--and if you don't like it, I dare you to do something about it."

Members of Congress have no choice but to accept the challenge. They did so once before, when Richard Nixon, who said, "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal," posed a similar threat to the Constitution. The only possible answer is to inform Bush forthwith that if he continues in his defiance, he will be impeached.



Comments

"The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form"
I remember reading an 80,000 word diatribe a few years back that said the same about Bush and conservatives, but used the word Fascism instead of dictatorship. Now this piece compares the GOP to Communist Party structure.

Either way, it's very typical. Completely overboard; exaggerated; off the wall and out to lunch.
I'm sure someone wrote this of same thing over Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy and Reagan. How about LBJ and the Democrat majority? Shit, the entire New Deal era could be described as such if someone wanted to do the homework, but that would be sacreligious I think to the very same people who are writing this.