Bush’s Dictator Dance Card is Full to Bursting

Last Thursday I ranted against President Bush’s admonishment of Barack Obama over whether the latter, as president, should have sit-down talks with North Korea, Cuba, or Iran. What I said specifically was that Bush was a pandering, hypocritical ass, or words to that effect. Without getting into the rightness or wrongness of sitting down with the world’s dictators I offer this.

Each year various publications rank the world’s worst dictators and with little variation those lists match up one to the other. About 70 countries are ruled by dictators. The day before I posted about Bush lecturing Obama on proper US foreign policy standards, I showed a picture of George Bush playing dress-up with number 20 on the 2007 list, Vladimir Putin, the rabidly anti-deomcratic president of Russia (soon to be anti-democratic prime minister after his self-appointed successor is “elected.”)

Following is George Bush standing next to, smiling, and–in one instance–apparently frolicking with various members of other leaders from the top 20 of 2007’s worst dictators list. Numbered for your convenience.

For the record Castro doesn’t even make the top 20.

With so many dance partners our lame duck leader is sure to get a little tired…but don’t worry, he has C. Rice to dance when he don’t want to.

President Pot, There’s a Mr. Kettle on the Phone for You

In a press conference this morning Bush had this to say to Obama who has had the gall to mention he might have sit-downs with Cuba and Iran.

“I have these wives of these dissidents come and see me,” he said. “And their stories are just unbelievably sad. It just goes to show how, you know, how repressive China has the Castro brothers have been when you listen to the truth about what they say. And the idea of embracing a leader who has done this without any attempt on his part to, you know, release prisoners and free their society, would be counterproductive and send the wrong signal.”

I struck through China, but I could just as easily have listed most of the leaders that Bush recently met with in the Middle East and anybody he’s ever talked to in Africa. Seriously, Bush (BUSH!?) is going to lecture Obama on how best to export human rights?–The guy that had his Justice Department release a memo stating that, despite norms of international law, the United States government did not have to obey the Geneva Conventions or the International Agreement on Human Rights? The guy that issued a signing statement maintaining that the executive branch retains the power to torture prisoners in contravention of US law? The guy that illegally wiretapped its own citizens? The guy that had (at least) two US citizens imprisoned without knowing why and denied them access to legal counsel for years? That President Bush is going to go in front of people and lecture on human rights?

For his own immorality and that of his friends, Bush should probably just keep his mouth shut on this issue for the next eleven months; he hanged the only person he had the moral authority to lecture on this topic.

I Will Miss You All

Aware that America’s ability to defend itself against terrorism would soon be weakened, House Democrats vainly attempted to extend the Protect America Act. Their valiant efforts to protect this city on a hill was thwarted by one man, President George W. Bush, who petulantly demanded that House Republicans vote against the extension, which they cravenly did. The very important Protect America Act will expire tonight. God help us all.

I just have one question: When will Bush and his hawkish cronies in Congress start taking this War on Terror seriously?

McConnell Thinks He Should be more Powerful

As Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is assumed to be two things: smart and a liar. The first thing, smart, is debatable. It could be that he merely has friends in high places. But I’m not talking about an innate intelligence. I just mean, an average, run-of-the-mill kind of smartness. The kind of smartness that comes from having “been around the block.” The world is overflowing with people of average or below average natural intellectual gifts; but many of them are smart just by the nature of having become familiar with their trade–the constant daily contact with the same materials, the same concepts, the same theoretical principles at work.

And the second thing, lying, I don’t mean as an insult. If our chief spy weren’t a good liar…well, I can only imagine the kinds of problems that may cause for us. But the chief spy should recognize something that the current chief (and his boss) seems to have missed: his enemy is not the American people. To use some of Bush’s own Unitary Executive Theory logic: what kind of sense does it make if the American people, being of one body, were to be its own enemy? With that in mind, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that McConnell use his deceptive powers for us and not against us.

I was initially going to do this great little cut and paste job where I pasted McConnell’s FISA lies from an OpEd in today’s Washington Post and then I would cut and paste from various Glenn Greenwald posts on the subject but it just wasn’t worth it. What is worth it, is reading the lies spewing from the White House in the guise of credible information from a “senior intelligence officer” and then going over and reading a handful of Glenn Greenwald’s posts on FISA and the Protect America Act.

Greenwald is a long-winded but fantastic commentator. I know it seems like a lot of reading but this is an important issue that it is worth being educated on. Here’s how Harpers’ Scott Horton talks about the issue to give you some idea of the times we’re living in:

…future generations looking back and tracing the destruction of the grand design of our Constitution may settle on yesterday, February 12, 2008, as the date of the decisive breach.

The bottom line here is this, George Bush and his cronies, if they want them, can continue to spy on all the terrorists they want. Under FISA and the PAA they have the power to spy on all communications where one person is on foreign soil. They have the right to spy on all communications that are routed through another country. What they don’t have the natural right to do is spy on calls between American citizens. And they can get that right if they go to the super secret rubberstamping FISA court which provides the very barest of oversight on a very powerful mechanism of the executive branch.

If the White House merely asked Congress to pass a permanent extension on PAA it would have passed in December.

The problem is that the White House wants to add a clause that gives retroactive immunity to telecoms that have broken several American laws passed by the American Congress (constituted of representatives elected by the American people)–laws that were passed to protect the American people from the potential abuses of an overreaching executive branch.

Now the executive branch has overreached despite the best efforts of Congress and the People to keep them in check and they have made very rich members of the private sector complicit in their tyrannical overreach. Now they demand immunity for those people–who, by the way–were paid to break the law…and who are now paying Senators and Congressmen to make sure they aren’t punished for it.

The White House insists that telecoms should be given a free pass this time so that they will be more willing to break the law in the future. Who cares what the White House wants? Is that what we want? Do we want insanely rich companies (and their senior staffs) to get even more rich by helping the government spy on us? The will of the government is always at odds with the will of the people and that’s why we have the very specific Constitution that we have–to protect the People from its Government.

This is a question of rewarding the greedy: those greedy for power and those greedy for cash. I’m not at all interested in rewarding either, doubly so since they were both gained at the expense of my personal liberty.

Laws that guarantee rights to privacy, protection from illegal searches and seizures, etc. do make law enforcement/criminal investigations harder to perform but they do so by protecting our civil liberties. It should be hard for them to invade our privacy. It’s a trade off, sure, but a good one–one that respects the rights of individuals and keeps governments weak enough that average law-abiding citizens need not fear their government. McConnell and the FBI want unlimited access to our emails, phone calls, etc…they are always going to tell Congress and judges and the People that such things are necessary…but they are liars. They are a vested interest whose motivations for such requests should be questioned.

We’re Doomed

As I mentioned in my last post, Romney is out. During his speech he provided the reason he is dropping out:

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Which means of course that if Clinton or Obama win they will most likely immediately lower the flags in DC, fold them up, and ship them to “Unknown location in the Pakistani Desert, c/o Mr. Bin Laden, RE: Unconditional Surrender of United States to Miscellaneous Terrorists Groups.”

But Romney, let it be known, isn’t going down alone. You see, him staying in the race–and he was such a strong contender that he has as much as 50% of the delegate votes as the frontrunner–distracted from the formation of a national campaign. Which means, of course, that unless Huckabee drops out too, he is no better than Clinton or Obama, since he’ll aid in their election by forestalling the GOP national campaign.

I hate to break this ya’ll, the GOP knows what time it is. Their national party machinists are already at work, greasing the wheels, sharpening the sprockets, oiling the chains, etc. Romney was a no go since New Hampshire and Huckabee’s strong performance in the South two days ago won’t be enough to salvage his campaign.

But the real issue here is….

Seriously?

On a related note–As OTB says, when candidates decide to “suspend their campaigns” it means something different for Republicans and Democrats. Suspended Democratic candidates are still technically in the race and their delegates stay with them. Republicans give their delegates back and the GOP state parties will divvy them up.

Up until today here are the states (and delegate numbers) that Romney won…and the second place winner.

Massachusetts (22)–McCain
Utah (36)–McCain
Michigan (23)–McCain
Minnesota (38)–McCain
Alaska (12)–Huckabee
Colorado (43)–McCain
Montana (25)–Paul (McCain was 3rd)
North Dakota (8)–McCain
Maine (18)–McCain
Nevada (17)–Paul (McCain was 3rd)
Wyoming (8)–Thompson (Hunter was 3rd; Giuliani 4th, and Huckabee 5th)

If the various GOP state parties just roll Romney’s pledged delegates to the 2nd place winners that’s 188 more votes for McCain bringing his total to 906 (pushing him that much closer to 1,191). They could very well elect not to do that…attempting to reapportion them by share of remaining voters. But even that, while helping Huckabee a little, will still help McCain a lot more, both because Huckabee is 2nd to McCain more often but also because McCain was 2nd to non-Huckabee wins more often too. (That is, in the two instances above where Paul was 2nd, McCain was third.)

Terrorists Use Mentally Disabled as Human Bombs

I’m a touch busy today and so I won’t post long, and, in order to break up the monotony a little bit, let’s talk about something other than the horserace

So, you may or may not have heard that last Friday two mentally disabled women (Downs Syndrome) had bombs strapped to their bodies, were led into the very populated Friday pet markets in Baghdad, and had the bombs detonated by remote control.

The discussion of this incident has died down over the week but initial concerns were:

1. As with all these things, how many people were killed and wounded. The linked article above says 98 dead and more than 207 wounded. The initial report I had read said 74 dead and that included the two women.
2. Conservative bloggers were saying that liberals would be overjoyed at this because it was proof that the surge wasn’t working and that liberals would have more evidence to pull our troops out.
3. Concern over whether or not the two women did in fact suffer from a mental disability or whether or not that was a “fact” cooked up by the Iraqi government (or the US forces) to raise sentiment against the insurgency.

In regard to the first point I, don’t have an answer. Certainly more deaths is worse, but in terms of how we understand this event and how we attempt to understand what this may mean about nature of future insurgent/terrorist attacks, numbers of casualties is of less concern than other things.

In regard to the second point, no one is happy that 74 people, or 300+ people were killed and wounded. Liberal or conservative, once we went into this war, which we would not have been able to do without Democratic votes, the hope was that we would win. People that want to keep us in this war are not bad people. They don’t want our soldiers to die. People that want us out of the war are not evil people either, that want Iraqis to die, or for American to retreat, or for us to shirk our moral obligation to rebuild. We are both rooting for what we think makes a better country and a better world.

Regardless of what we want however, the realities of combat, the realities of the nature of the insurgency, the realities of the commitment of the Iraqi government to aid the efforts at rebuilding are all elements of whether or not we succeed, what the costs of that success will be, and what the cost of abandonment of our mission will be. Wars are not won or lost in our heads. The Germans very much wanted to win World War II. Losing had very high costs for them. But that desire to win ran head first into the reality of defeat.

Insurgent attacks are a real cost of this war. Ignoring them is impossible. What we must do instead is understand the cost of this conflict and make a reasoned assessment whether continuing is worth the price. Personally, I think the price of success is infinitely high and it is therefore obvious that no reward can justify the price. Sure, Friday’s attacks are further evidence that this is the case. But that doesn’t make me happy. The fact that the military defense budget expanded again and is likely going to need $200 billion more dollars on top of what they requested is a real fact undermining our ability to conduct this war to a successful inclusion. It’s a fact that will likely lead to our return but that doesn’t make me happy either.

But I have presumed something that I don’t think is so easy to presume, that the bombings are, in fact, evidence of the infinite cost of our involvement in the war.

I think we can look at this attack in one of two ways with very important differences and policy recommendations.

We could take this attack to mean that the “endless stream of martyrs” that Al-Qaeda in Iraq says they have is starting to run out–or has already run out. As discussed here previously, the effect of suicide bombers is that they project an image of an irrational actor in a rational system.  A person willing to risk absolutely everything in pursuit of a goal is a very dangerous enemy. His attacks do not stand up to reason, and as reasonable people ourselves we are prevented from understanding what he will do or what he is capable of. Strategies that work against traditional bad guys, do not work against suicidists.

There is a movement to rename “suicide terrorists” to “homicide terrorists” because it takes the attention and sympathy away from the culprit and places it on the victims, where it belongs. But the phrase and its support is misguided. All bombing attacks that kill others are homicide attacks. The suicide attack is special because it has this added menace in reality, not just in theory. It says something different about the nature of our enemies and therefore affects the strategic options we might choose. “Homicide bombers” does not beneficially add to the discourse or to the strategic prescriptions.

We have always known that the insurgents in Iraq were willing to kill indiscriminately in pursuit of their goals. If they’ve run out of people willing to suicide themselves for their goals, I think we have to consider this, I hesitate to say it this way, good news. It is of course, not good news that the terrorists have moved from very bad to very, very bad. It isn’t good news that they have upped their horrific-ness to this level. But, if it says that they are running low of the public support they need to replenish their pool of martyrs, this may symbolize a very important and positive turning point in regard to our future success against this insurgency.

However. It could also be very bad new, worse news than the bare reading of the facts may indicate. There are two facts that are fairly well understood that govern this second, and opposing, interpretation of this event. 1) Insurgencies, by their very nature, require the support of the common people. Mao-Tse Tung famously called this support the “hearts and minds” of the people–a phrase co-opted by counter-insurgencies over the last sixty years. Insurgencies and therefore counter-insurgencies amount to “battles for the hearts and minds of the people.” Anybody who has read a newspaper since March 2003 has heard this phrase repeated countless times. 2) Over the course of the last couple of years, Iraqi support for the insurgency has been dropping. This has been good news because without this public support it was believed that support would move from the insurgents to those fighting them. Recent reports seem to indicate otherwise. While support for the insurgents has dropped, support for the counterinsurgents has not risen (except in very isolated areas). It could be interpreted that what this event symbolizes is a public statement from the insurgents that they no longer care for or need public sympathy for their cause.

If true, it adds a new face to insurgent/counter-insurgent warfare. There is no doubt that, at least in The West, this event is totally despicable. Reports out of Iraq seem to indicate that they feel the same way. This attack officializes that the terrorists are demons, the worst kind of sub-human. It seems like an event that would significantly reduce the amount of remaining (and already dropping) public support. The planners of this attack would no doubt be aware of that affect and so we can only assume that it was intended. What happens to an insurgency that effectively de-links itself from the people they had previously been fighting on behalf of? In lieu of deep analysis, I point to the types of activities that are going on in other failed states–in the Balkans and throughout Africa. Crimes committed without political motive are not officially terrorism, but just crime. A statement like this, if we can interpret it in the way I’ve proposed, moves the terrorist activities away from terrorism and into just crime, murder for murders’ sake. They still may maintain rhetorically that their aim is to drive out the US invaders but if they do that for their own interests as a special band of brigands it is not really a “political” motivation.

If all of this is true Iraq is degrading further still into uncontrollable criminal factions. The crimes will likely get worse and more public as this band of criminals, now further marginalized, seeks to exercise control only through fear. The crimes will get more despicable and more public. And since they are not linked to any theoretical motivation, no concessions can be offered that will significantly derail their behavior.

Of course, that is just one of two options, and even by focusing on two, I have probably oversimplified. It could be, for example, that the terrorists thought no one would find out that they had done this, that we would believe they were suicide attacks. To be sure, most newspapers referred to the attacks in just that way.

Those Oh so Moral Republicans!

One of the most fascinating topics in political philosophy that I’ve run across is the concept of “dirty hands.” While the basic scenario is important, it is off topic for me today. What is important to me is the fundamental issue at work: politics is dirty and there is absolutely no way to perform well in politics and remain clean. Not every action in politics is dirty and that which is dirty is not always equally dirty. And by dirty I don’t necessarily mean illegal.

At the very least there is, as Machiavelli pointed out, a fundamental separation between values within the world of politics and values within the realm of traditional ethics (I’m being general but I am speaking specifically of Christian values, although any teleological normative system is fine, even non-religious ones…although, in my opinion they are easier to work around.).

The Christian God is pretty straightforward on 1) not killing, 2) not lying, 3) not working on some official holy day of rest and a few other things. The Jesus version of the Christian God is pretty straightforward on being peaceful, forgiving another’s trespasses, picking out the plank in our own eye before noting the splinter in our brothers eye, rich people not being able to get into heaven, being humble in all things, and forgoing personal excesses of wealth.

However, a president (and for that matter congresspeople) have to be ready to send troops into battle. A flick of the pen and self-serving theologians can say that God meant “no killing of innocents” although that is not what the law says and, in this instance, I’m a strict constructivist. But even that rewriting of God’s law doesn’t quite work. “Collateral damage” is factored in to every bomb drop and house raid. The president not only knows that ordering an attack will cause civilian (innocent) death, but approximately how many will die. He knows that many of them are children who have not yet been corrupted by the ideologies of their parents (if we assume that the others are somehow “guilty”of something because of their beliefs.)

The same self-serving theologian could argue that the Old Testament God, the one from which the commandment against killing arrived was pro-war and therefore only meant something like “no killing of one of your own” (since the Old Testament wars were almost only wars against opposing religious groups). But that doesn’t explain our firebombing of Dresden, the Revolutionary War against Britain, the Civil War against the South, and all the “small wars” that took place throughout the very Catholic Latin America (keeping in mind I’m not including the “clearly guilty” and atheist communists we fought against, but rather all the “collateral damage” including the CIA-admitted genocide in Nicaragua.) Even locally, how far removed from the commandment against murder is he when the president allows Americans to die if by “one of your own” God meant to define the restriction in terms of citizenship? Certainly God recognized that there were both sins of commission, like putting a Titan missile into a madrassa, and sins of omission, like failing to properly repair the levees outside New Orleans and failing to put a person in charge of FEMA with some emergency management experience.

God does not let you into heaven based on a balance of good and bad acts. It’s not God’s up there with a spreadsheet tallying lives saved against lives wasted. “You killed or were responsible for the deaths of 3 million Mr. Bush, but, thankfully, but since you upheld 10% of your promise for African aid, you saved maybe, 100,000. But you didn’t go into Darfur like you should have which caused the death of 300,000, but you did…” Even a good president who actually used the power of his office to save lives around the world would have a hard time accounting for the millions of deaths from all the unstopped (or actively supported) dictators of the world. And clearly a president can’t be judged on counterfactuals like, “You didn’t bomb Beijing” which would be as good as saying “You didn’t blow up the planet.” I mean, neither did I, and I didn’t cause the deaths of a 1.5 million Iraqi children through ten years of international sanctions.

So presidents murder and they spend a great deal of time not preventing murders that they have the power to stop. There are political reasons of course. We have this thing called “sovereignty”and this related things called “self-determination.” These things are two political concepts, the belief in which prevents presidents from sending in the Army and Marines to stop every genocide it hears about. But, my understanding is God doesn’t care about our made up laws. There is only God’s law, and a good Christian president would have to disobey international law to follow God’s law.

So just in terms of this one commandment, we have to assume that presidents don’t make good Christians and vice versa. And that leads us to two related points. 1) Any president that claims they can balance being a good Christian and being a good president is a liar or they are stupid. In either case, I don’t want them to be my leader. and 2) Since all presidents are going to have to murder people, I feel like I should elect the guy (or gal) who is going to murder the least people…and stop the most worldwide atrocities.

So how does one make that determination? First I think we have to determine at least some of the important ways that people die as a result of the political decisions of our elected leaders.

Right off the bat (and probably because I’m thinking religiously for the moment), there is the death penalty and abortion. There’s also the deaths related to poverty–preventable illnesses like malnutrition, diarrhea, dehdryation. There is, of course, cancer, heart disease, and automobile accidents which, in no particular order, are the top three killers in the country. There is also murder. And suicide.

Internationally the big killers are the poverty diseases: malnutrition, dehydration, diarrhea–like those that afflict the American poor–but also measles, mumps, malaria, tuberculosis, and a handful of others, nearly all of which we have treatments for. There is of course HIV/AIDS. There are the big-name genocides like those in Darfur and there are big-name human rights abuses like the dowry deaths in India, public decapitations in Saudi Arabia, and the constant disappearances of dissidents in China and Russia. The biggest worldwide killer right now after the poverty-related diseases are the peripheral deaths related to civil wars like the one in the Congo.

Oh! And there is the small matter of those two wars we are fighting which is not only causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand of civilians, it is also killing thousands of Americans to boot. In addition to those Americans killed directly in the war (about 3500) the NY Times has found 121 homicides committed by soldiers that have returned from one of the two conflicts and (probably) 102 Afghanistan/Iraq-related suicides which, as far as I’m concerned are casualties of war as well.

And, while there is no commandment against torture, I have to say that, at the very least, those people who are tortured to death should count as murdered–as should those three “detainees” in Guantanamo who finally succeeded in killing themselves last June.

So, if I have to choose my future president based purely off a standard of not increasing the tally of murdered innocents and with the possibility that he or she might actually try to do something to save those already condemned to death by the current state of the world, am I going to vote for a Republican or a Democrat? Well, those Republican are against abortion, and that sounds pretty Christian…

It sure is hard. Which guy was it that said we should “double the size of Guantanamo?” was that Obama? No. Which candidates are running in support of the war? Which candidates are preventing stem cell research to help cure cancer? Which side, Republicans or Democrats have had more effect fighting crime by reducing poverty? Which candidates are talking about extending health coverage to the uninsured so that people can stop dying of malnutrition in the richest country in the world?

Oh yeah, the atheist, secular demons in the DNC. But don’t forget, they are pro-choice and in the grand scheme of things…ach…you get it by now.

There’s lots of ways to murder in the world, how is that Republicans have gotten the stranglehold on morality by fighting against just one of them?

Bush is “Teaching us a Lesson”

I totally forgot about this in my notes this morning: Bush wants us all to die to teach the Democrats a lesson. Seriously. For those of you who don’t know anything about this issue, here’s the (substantially pared down) skinny:

A long long time ago, when senators and representatives got mad that the president had too much power and couldn’t seem to use it properly (Nixon: Watergate, et. al.) they passed a law (FISA) that said (among other things) that when the president wants to spy on somebody he has get a warrant from the judicial branch. This law did not say that the president couldn’t spy on people, but that he would have to prove things like, the person deserved to be spied on.

Well, after George Bush became president, he immediately started using the NSA and various telecommunications conglomerates to spy on people…without warrants! But according to President Bush and friends, the president doesn’t have to obey laws. He’s above the law (seriously). And since the president is above the law, if he tells someone to do something that is illegal, then they are above that law too.

When the illegal spying on Americans was discovered Bush & Co. they said that 9/11 made it necessary for them to spy on Americans…y’know…to protect us. Except, it turned out, they had been doing it all along! So, who, exactly, were they spying on while they weren’t taking the terrorist threat seriously enough to do anything about it? The world will (likely) never know.

But, at any rate, the FISA legislation might legitimately have some restrictions that need updating given the particular nature of international terrorism in an increasingly mobile and connected world. So Bush said that Congress had to pass The Protect America Act. He basically said that if PAA was not passed, all Americans everywhere would die in simultaneous terrorist attacks everywhere all at once in a really bad, agonizing way and Congress would have no one to blame but themselves; and that’s how they would spend the last horrible seconds of all their lives: wishing they had passed PAA and President Bush, in his last seconds, would be somewhere bleeding nearby saying “I told you so.” And that thought, that mere thought, was enough for Congress to say, “OK fine.” And so they passed it. And ever since America has suffered no new terrorist attacks. Or something like that.

Well. The FISA amendment expires on Thursday. Congress has been considering renewing it but the White House wants to add something extra special to the renewal. Remember those telecommunications conglomerates that helped President Bush break the law? Well, he wants them to get off scott free. He wants immunity for them.

He says that America will become vulnerable if corporations have to follow our laws. Neat! Because, the way I see it, America becomes vulnerable if corporations don’t have to follow our laws. “We are a nation fo laws, not men…” and all that.

Well, Chris Dodd, the senator who recently dropped from the presidential race, has successfully had the debate postponed until this week (Congress was threatened to renew PAA back in December). And, as of yesterday, Dodd successfully started a Democratic filibuster. Because (God on Highest!) the Democrats think that America’s “deliberative body” should start deliberating.

Now, this deliberation could take a little while. And after their done deliberating, assuming they can come to some conclusions, they will have to vote on the bill. The bill will go to the House, which will have to vote on it. Any differences will have to be ironed out in conference, and then PAA can be renewed. Bottom line, the bill won’t be done by Thursday.

The Democrats, who have already been informed by the President that this bill is important lest we all face immediate and agonizing Death by Terrorism, tried to pass a 30-day extension to the current legislation which would both protect America and give Senators time to chat about “the rule of law,” “the fourth amendment,” and “the fate of the free world” and perhaps what to call the new soup offered in the cafeteria.

Well…

Bush threatened to veto an extension. Why? Because Congress should just do what they’re told, grant immunity to multi-billionaire lawbreakers and pass the damned bill. There is no thinking, there is no deliberation, there is no debate. The president says “jump” and bygollybygosh, senators shouldn’t even ask “how high” they should just fucking jump.

So, in effect, making America vulnerable to inevitable attack is the price we pay for Congress’s insistence on representing us in Washington.

Oh! did I mention that because the President childishly threatened to veto a 30-day extension the Republicans voted across the board to not even pass it? Because that’s what they did.

That’s right, every single Republican decided to not even try challenging the President’s will, even though doing so meant (supposedly) making America vulnerable to imminent attack.

Of course the reality is that PAA is not and has never been necessary. The President could always spy on people that he could reasonably show to a secret court were terrorists. PAA did not protect us from imminent attack and the only reason the new legislation is even up for consideration for renewal is because major political funders are at risk of being slapped on the wrist by Congress. I mean seriously, no one’s going to jail over this. Even without immunity the worst that will happen is that ATT (et. al) will have explained to them (again) that just because the president says it’s OK doesn’t mean it is. If FISA needs updating, and it is somewhat uncertain if it does, and it is even more uncertain where it needs updating, then that’s a topic that should be debated and discussed, heavily, in Congress and in the public forums.

Just know that your childish president hopes you die to teach those bastards in Congress a lesson.

Head over to Glenn Greenwald’s blog over on Salondotcom for a much more robust but ultimately more accurate and detailed rundown of the whole thing. He’s been covering it at least since the renewed debate in November/December but his two posts from Monday are as good an introduction as you probably need.