This Cannot End Well

In case you thought Haiti didn't have enough tsuris already:

Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier returned Sunday to Haiti after nearly 25 years in exile, a surprising and perplexing move that comes as his country struggles with a political crisis and the stalled effort to recover from last year's devastating earthquake.

Duvalier, wearing a dark suit and tie, arrived on an Air France jet to hugs from supporters at the Port-au-Prince airport. He was calm as he was led into the immigration office and did not immediately make a statement to a waiting crowd of journalists.

"He is happy to be back in this country, back in his home," said Mona Beruaveau, a candidate for Senate in a Duvalierist party who spoke to the former dictator inside the immigration office. "He is tired after a long trip."

Beruaveau said he would give a news conference on Monday.

There were no immediate protests in reaction to his return and very few people were even aware that the former dictator had come back to Haiti.

In the fall of 2007, President Rene Preval told reporters that Duvalier could return to Haiti but would face justice for the deaths of thousands of people and the theft of millions of dollars.

Haitians danced in the streets to celebrate the overthrow of Duvalier back in 1986, heckling the tubby, boyish tyrant as he was driven to the airport in a black limousine and flown into exile in France. Most Haitians hoped the rapacious strongman known had left for good, closing a dark chapter of terror and repression that began under his late father, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

But a handful of loyalists have been campaigning to bring Duvalier home from exile in France, launching a foundation to improve the dictatorship's image and reviving Baby Doc's political party in the hopes that one day he can return to power democratically.

...to always remind me of how close I came to danger."

As I continue to read about the extent to which the Bush Administration was prepared to use the 9/11 attacks to destroy everything this country stands for, I keep being reminded of the line that Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I says about 1:30 into this final scene from the 1998 film Elizabeth:

There will always be voices who say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are gone, and that we should not look back but look forward. But just as in this version of the fall of Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth keeps him around as a reminder of the treachery that she will always face, so must we never, ever forget just how close George W. Bush, who said on March 18, 2002 that we were attacked because "they hate our freedom", was prepared to take away more of our freedom than terrorists could ever dream possible:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.

But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

I suppose George Bush was still holding out hope that we would be attacked again and he could become the dictator he so clearly wanted to be. And once it became clear that any attack would be viewed as a false flag operation by a sizable number of Americans, he had to revoke these rules rather than pass them on to be used by anyone else -- perhaps the one remotely redemptive thing his Administration did, even if their reasons for doing so were self-serving.

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

And they said I was paranoid...

For the last four years, until January 20, I frequently expressed concern about the dictatorial ambitions of George W. Bush. Many people thought me paranoid, or crazy. After all, no American president would so brazenly flout the very Constitution he'd pledged to uphold, would he?

Well, yes, he would have. Given another terrorist attack, or perhaps even another natural disaster on a par with Hurricane Katrina, and he might have:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military could have kicked in doors to raid a suspected terrorist cell in the United States without a warrant under a Bush-era legal memo the Justice Department made public on Monday.

The memo, from October 23, 2001, also said constitutional free-speech protections and a prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure could take a back seat to military needs in fighting terrorism inside the country.

It was one of nine previously undisclosed memos and legal opinions which shed light on former U.S. President George W. Bush's legal guidance as he launched a war against terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

They depict an administration apparently determined to expand the president's power after the shock of September 11, and add fuel to critics' charges that fundamental constitutional protections were threatened in the process.

"The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically," Justice Department officials John Yoo and Robert Delahunty wrote White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in the October 23 memo.

"We do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a (search) warrant," they said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires a probable cause and a warrant to execute a search. However, the memo said those requirements "are unsuited to the demands of wartime."

Furthermore, it said, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

When we think of all the "You're with us or you're with the terrorists" rhetoric, and the way antiwar nuns were put on the no-fly list, and Quaker peace groups were infiltrated and put under surveillance, and then you read this, it's hard not to become aware of just how close we came to the dictatorship that Bush had so often expressed he'd like to head.

If you liked the secretiveness of George W. Bush, you'll LOVE Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin doesn't believe in open, accountable government either:

In June, Andrée McLeod, a self-described independent government watchdog in Alaska, sent an open records act request to the office of Governor Sarah Palin. She requested copies of all the emails that had been sent and received by Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey, two top aides to Palin, from February through April of this year. McLeod, a 53-year-old registered Republican who has held various jobs in state government, suspected that Frye and Bailey had engaged in political activity during official business hours in that period by participating in a Palin-backed effort to oust the state chairman of the Alaska Republican party, Randy Ruedrich. (Bailey has been in the national news of late for refusing to cooperate with investigators probing whether Palin fired Alaska's public safety commission because he did not dismiss a state trooper who had gone through an ugly divorce with Palin's sister.)

In response to her request, McLeod received four large boxes of emails. This batch of documents did not contain any proof that Frye and Bailey had worked on government time to boot out Ruedrich. But there was other information she found troubling. Several of the emails suggested to her that Palin's office had used its influence to reward a Fairbanks surveyor who was a Palin fundraiser with a state job. In early August, McLeod filed a complaint with the state attorney general against Palin, Bailey, and other Palin aides, claiming they had violated ethics and hiring laws. Palin, now the Republican vice-presidential candidate, told the Alaska Daily News that "there were no favors done for anybody."

But more intriguing than any email correspondence contained in the four boxes was what was not released: about 1100 emails. Palin's office provided McLeod with a 78-page list (PDF) cataloging the emails it was withholding. Many of them had been written by Palin or sent to her. Palin's office claimed most of the undisclosed emails were exempt from release because they were covered by the "executive" or "deliberative process" privileges that protect communications between Palin and her aides about policy matters. But the subject lines of some of the withheld emails suggest they were not related to policy matters. Several refer to one of Palin's political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. Moreover, some of the withhold emails were CC'ed to Todd Palin, the governor's husband. Todd Palin—a.k.a. the First Dude—holds no official state position (though he has been a close and influential adviser for Governor Palin). The fact that Palin and her aides shared these emails with a citizen outside the government undercuts the claim that they must be protected under executive privilege. McLeod asks, "What is Sarah Palin hiding?"

Hmmmm....vindictiveness towards political opponents, claiming executive privilege, believing oneself as God's anointed agent -- John McCain may not be George W. Bush, but Sarah Palin sure as hell is.

Dictatorships and Double Standards, or So What Else Is New?

At Wednesday's press conference, President Spoiled Brat Tantrum blasted Barack Obama for being willing to "sit down with tyrants who put their people in prison based on their political beliefs":

Via Dday comes this post at Cogitamus, showing George W. Bush....sitting down with tyrants.

And HOW much money do we give Pervez Musharraf?

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., George W. Bush doesn't have to give the direct order, his mandate is clear when we see protesters against his policies here arrested for their political beliefs. Like these protesters in Kennebunkport on July 1, 2007:

Or the protesters arrested near Bush's ranch in Crawford on November 23, 2005. Or the arrest of Bikes against Bush member Joshua Kinsberg on August 28, 2004 while demonstrating a device that draws protest messages on a sidewalk in water-soluble chalk to MSNBC reporter Ron Reagan. Or the seven protesters arrested near Blackwater headquarters last October. Or the protesters against drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico arrested at Legends Field in Tampa in June 2001. Or the protesters arrested outside the United Nations on September 25 of last year during a peaceful demonstration against Bush's appearance before the General Assembly. Or the two Nobel Peace Prize winners and others arrested outside the White House on March 26, 2003 while protesting the Iraq War.

Need I go on?

Does this mean Bush can't sit down with himself?

This is what happens when you don't stand up to a bully

So what are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi planning to do about this:

President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

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Bush made the assertion in a signing statement that he issued late Monday after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. In the signing statement, Bush asserted that four sections of the bill unconstitutionally infringe on his powers, and so the executive branch is not bound to obey them.

"Provisions of the act . . . purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief," Bush said. "The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President."

One section Bush targeted created a statute that forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq."

The Bush administration is negotiating a long-term agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The agreement is to include the basing of US troops in Iraq after 2008, as well as security guarantees and other economic and political ties between the United States and Iraq.

The negotiations have drawn fire in part because the administration has said it does not intend to designate the compact as a "treaty," and so will not submit it to Congress for approval. Critics are also concerned Bush might lock the United States into a deal that would make it difficult for the next president to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

"Every time a senior administration official is asked about permanent US military bases in Iraq, they contend that it is not their intention to construct such facilities," said Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., Democrat of Pennsylvania, in a Senate speech yesterday. "Yet this signing statement issued by the president yesterday is the clearest signal yet that the administration wants to hold this option in reserve."

Several other congressional Democrats also took issue with the signing statement.

So are they going to just talk, or are they going to do something to rein in this guy before he hogties the next president before s/he even takes office?

You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to declare themselves dictator-for-life

During the Clinton years, the wingnuts speculated that Bill Clinton would declare martial law and stay on past the 2000 election -- despite the fact that Bill Clinton had never once articulated any dictatorial ambitions -- unlike George W. Bush, who has repeatedly said he'd like to be a dictator.

Lost in the brouhaha surrounding Bush's Tuesday press conference, in which he invoked World War III, was this little tidbit:

Q Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for a moment. He said recently that next year when he has to step down, according to the constitution, as President, he may become Prime Minister, in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuine democratic transition there. Senator McCain --

THE PRESIDENT: I've been planning that myself. (Laughter.)

When a president repeatedly makes "jokes" about being a dictator, and about staying on when his term is over, isn't there a point at which it stops being laughworthy and becomes a statement of what he would really like to do?

Have conservatives finally had enough of Bush/Cheney?

A circuitous route starting with Shamanic at Newshoggers and winding its way through Andrew Sullivan points us to this comment posted at FrontPage, from a conservative who doesn't need to continue to prop up this profoundly UN-conservative Administration -- and the right-wing press that still insists a pile of dung is a diamond -- any longer:

" I was very reluctant to write this letter because it is so negative, but I've reached the point in which I can no longer stay silent. With your last column, I've decided to stop reading WorldNetDaily. That fact probably means nothing to you since I've never been able to support you financially. But it means something to me. For over eight years I have faithfully read WND every day. I trusted you. I believed you.

To suggest that the press coverage of Abu Ghraib and the reduction of "interrogation" has caused us to "lose" (support for) the war is nonsense. We are losing in Iraq because we haven't defined the enemy and we aren't there to "win." What would winning look like, anyway? This undeclared "war" was never meant to be "won," but to secure a large American presence in Iraq. And why do you and all of the other so-called "conservative" news media ignore the president of Iraq's statement that they are ready for us to leave?

You and others who claim to stand for conservative Christians have gone down that terrible road of endorsing deception, violence and fiscal irresponsibility to justify the actions of a president (whom I voted for twice) who is not only out of touch with his country, but close to becoming our first dictator.

Now the drumbeats are calling for us to "take care of" Iran next. Hitler had his scapegoat in the Jews and Bush has his in the Muslims. And my fellow Christians are happily following him down a terrible path laced with lies, torture, violence and genocide. After it is all over and the dust has cleared, what will we do when they tell the world that the Christians are now the enemy? Haven't we learned anything from history? When we condemn and entire group of people for the actions of a few, we are no better than those who have turned away from God.

You and the others who support the evolution of our political process into essentially a one-party system are guilty of contributing to the destruction of our beloved republic. I am so sorry that you of all people bought into this madness. I really used to enjoy reading WND, but now I've deleted it from my database because you have become like the rest of the people who claim to follow Jesus: You lust for war, violence, torture and injustice. You will say anything to justify these things, which you know go against the teachings of Jesus. Which Jesus supports these things? Not the Jesus I follow, and I have been a Bible-believing traditional conservative Christian for 24 years. Go ahead and rationalize it all you want. We all have to answer to God for our actions, and I will no longer stand with my fellow Christians and endorse this insanity because after four years, I have come to the conclusion that we were deceived right from the start."

For years I've been branded as crazy by the wingnuts who come to this site via Memeorandum and Real Clear Politics, and those who for some strange reason feel a need to visit here and lay turds in the punch bowl for their own amusement, because I've noted that the kind of consolidation of power sought by the Bush/Cheney regime, combined with the Third Reich-sounding use of words like "Homeland", is reminiscent of the forces that gave rise to Hitler in the 1930's. Does it require the vindication of a few conservative Christians are seeing it too to turn it into sanity?

Now we know for certain that there will be another terrorist attack

Remember all those times that George W. Bush said he wanted to be a dictator?

Well, here's how he's going to do it:

With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.

Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”

He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”

The White House released it on May 9.

Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.

The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”

It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”

This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include “localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.”

The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.

But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”

The document waves at the need to work closely with the other two branches, saying there will be “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government.” But this effort will be “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial
branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers.”

Among the efforts coordinated by the President would ensuring the capability of the three branches of government to “provide for orderly succession” and “appropriate transition of leadership.”

The document designates a National Continuity Coordinator, who would be the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Dictatorship and the President as Strong Daddy

I have a very dear friend whom I regard as the Average American Voter. This is the mythical American soccer mom made flesh, except for the fact that her extremely well-adjusted and happy kids have benefitted from NOT having their every minute tightly scheduled and controlled by team sports, dance classes, music lessons, tae kwon do and Kumon. She's moderate in her political views, when she has them, which isn't often because as the mother of two children in a two-income family, she just doesn't have time. What she knows of current events is what she hears on Good Morning America while getting the kids and herself ready for school. She doesn't spend much time thinking about the state of the world or the war or the collapsing housing market, not because she's incurious or doesn't care, because she's just too damn busy.

Back during the Reagan years, however, she was that incurious. I remember explaining to her about checks and balances when she said, "I don't see why the president can't do whatever he wants."

There's a mindset that thinks the president should be able to do whatever he wants because of a profound lack of understanding of how our system works, combined with the way the pomp and circumstance of the presidency has increased, going all the way back to John F. Kennedy. But it's one thing to have forgotten public school civics lessons (yes, there used to be such things), but it's quite another to fancy yourself to be a student of American history and our Constitutional system and believe that the president is a dictator.

Glenn Greenwald writes about a conference call between former Maine Sen. George Mitchell and Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, in which the latter states that the Founding Fathers

...sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

The notion that our Constitution vests anything like "near dictatorial power" in the President in any area -- let alone areas as broadly defined as "foreign policy and war" and "national security" -- is so utterly absurd that no response ought to be required. In his post, Goldfarb places a link over the phrase "near dictatorial power" which takes one to Federalist 70, which contains Alexander Hamilton's argument as to why powers assigned by the Constitution to the Executive ought to be vested in one individual rather than an executive council.

Who knows what support Goldfarb thinks there is anywhere in the Federalist Papers for a belief in "near dictatorial power," but if I had to guess, Goldfarb is likely referring to this sentence in Federalist 70:

Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.

Goldfarb seems to think that when Hamilton described a Roman "Dictator" with "absolute power," he was describing what he hoped the new American President would be. Does that argument need any refutation?

[snip]

America was founded to avoid the warped and tyrannical vision which The Weekly Standard and its comrades crave (and which they have spent the last six years pursuing and implementing). This group actually thinks that, right this very minute, we are at war with Iran and Syria -- and that the President can and should act accordingly against our "Enemies." And they think that even though Congress has not declared war on those countries, something they consider to be only an irrelevant technicality, even though it is that "technicality" which Hamilton, in Federalist 69, identified as one of the key features distinguishing the American President from the British King:

The one [the American President] would have a a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other [the British King], in addition to this right, possesses that of declaring war, and of raising and regulating fleets and armies by his own authority.

This is what's so dangerous about the common and endless repeated reference to the president as "the Commander-in-Chief." This should NOT be a reference to the president as "commander of the country", it simply refers to the president's role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. When the media and others who are fixated on the notion of the president as some sort of demigod (but only if he's a Republican), and use the "commander-in-chief" moniker, it distorts and perverts the notion of the presidency as an elective office, one of service to the country. The president is the person the electors chosen by the American people elect to serve the people; to act as temporary steward of the Constitution. It is not an elected kingship, and to refer to the temporary occupant of the office using the word "commander-in-chief" opens the doors for people like Michael Goldfarb and William Kristol to tout their dreams of a strong, all-powerful Daddy figure in stentorian tones that show the kind of Very Serious Scholars they are. The only problem is that they haven't a clue what they're talking about.

I don't know anything about Goldfarb's lineage, but William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, the Trotskyite turned founding father of the neocon movement. And you thought YOUR family had issues.