Twilight in America
by Ken Wikle
Posted on 2007-10-30 11:51:48
One terrorist attack away from the end of our democracy
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” This sentence, attributed to the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, is ubiquitous on the internet. Its salience is well deserved – we live in dangerous times.
Our twilight began with the installation of the Bush administration by the US Supreme Court. Bush was and is an appallingly vacuous individual, possessing huge gaps in the foundational knowledge and wisdom needed for policy making. As his candidacy progressed and this became apparent to powerful Republicans, Dick Cheney was brought on board to select a running mate. He instead maneuvered himself into the position, knowing that if they won he could play off Bush’s shortcomings and become a major decision maker in his own right. He has been enormously successful in this endeavor.
Many prior presidents have had shadow advisors, but this one-man brain trust presents a serious problem. Dick Cheney is a dangerous subversive.
Cheney’s neoconservative perception of what the United States government is all about is extraordinary by most standards. For over 200 years American scholars and indeed the American people have been persuaded that our government is made of three coequal branches of government that impose checks and balances on one another. But in Cheney’s view the executive branch is supreme and the other branches must bend to its will. The Constitution says that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, thus, Cheney says, all matters that involve or may involve military power or the threat of military power and all matters of national security fall under the exclusive purview of the executive.
Because just about any presidential decision of any significance can be said to fall under the rubric of “national security,” Cheney contends that the president has the sole right to make most decisions, to the exclusion of the Congress or the courts. The United States is, according to his view, an authoritarian state, with an elected CEO. We should become, Cheney has stated, a nation ruled by men rather than laws. His boss, the President of the United States, has been quoted as saying that the constitution is “…just a goddamned piece of paper.”
Cheney has been promoting his perceptions of US government for years. As Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush during the first Gulf War, he urged that the president could order the invasion of Iraq without first asking Congress, even though the constitution says only Congress can declare war. After the president ignored Cheney and went to the Congress anyway, Cheney asserted that Bush should invade Iraq even if Congress said no.
Cheney began laying the groundwork for unprecedented power from the moment he took office as vice president, operating in total secrecy. Like Mafioso, he and his staff almost never make notes, seldom reduce anything to writing and send no emails. Cheney grants interviews only when he has something he wants made public, and then only to chosen flacks like Rush Limbaugh. The press cannot even find out who is on his staff, Cheney claiming a right to keep such information secret.
Cheney is totally unscrupulous, giving him an advantage over those with moral fiber. He will say anything to advance his position, truth or falsity being irrelevant, and he’ll stab anyone in the back if it suits his purpose, as people like Colin Powell and John Ashcroft can testify. But above all, Cheney holds a black belt in outmaneuvering those who hold opposing views. After 9/11 he brought forth the program where suspected enemies were sequestered away at Guantanamo Bay or other foreign locations and tortured until they talked or died. He pulled this off by corrupting the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and secretly submitting his plan to the president.
Throughout its prior existence the OLC was a mini supreme court. Its lawyers would analyze the constitutionality of proposed acts and policies, and give the White House a no-holds-barred opinion. Cheney has no use for institutional integrity and stacked the OLC with lawyers who would validate the results he wanted. Principal among them was an odious sycophant by the name of John Yoo.
Yoo believes that the commands of the leader should be followed. Crafting an argument to support any position is not difficult for a talented and clever lawyer like Yoo; skillful lawyers can assemble seemingly persuasive arguments defending clearly guilty child molesters. Thus Yoo dutifully authored an OLC opinion that prisoners could be held without due process and placed under duress until they talked. Yoo was careful never to advocate torture, a crime under US and international law, a feat he accomplished by redefining non-torture to include everything but killing or dismembering the prisoner.
Cheney secretly presented the Yoo torture plan to Bush and convinced him to sign it. No other act by any president has taken us further from our core values. In the eyes of the world our leadership models have become less like Thomas Jefferson and more like master torturer Idi Amin Dada, Uganda’s one-time President for Life.
Undeterred and once again aided by a captive OLC, Cheney and Bush moved on to a program of illegally eavesdropping on the conversations and communications of American citizens.
But even as the courts and the Congress work to undo these evil and unlawful acts, we submerge into Justice Douglas’s twilight. Our mainstream media glosses over conspicuous attempts to undermine our constitution with on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand reportage, and no member of Congress with power to do anything has the courage to mention the word impeachment. One marvels comparing the passion exercised when a president falsely denied a sexually liaison with the apathy demonstrated in response to the criminal acts wrought by Cheney and Bush. The prevailing attitude is “don’t worry about it; they’ll be gone soon enough.” Maybe not.
The clear danger we face is this. The people who control our most powerful institutions believe that the executive branch should have total dominance over government. At the same time they are utterly lacking in ethical inhibitions. At the slightest excuse they are likely to invoke what they will claim are the legitimate emergency powers of the commander-in-chief. We are thus one terrorist attack away from the end of our democracy.
Our future is in the hands of Osama bin Laden.
Ken Wikle is a columnist for the Russian River Times – Published October 26, 2007
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