The great white father loves you

A friend of mine was telling me about a book he's reading on the Iraq War. In it, a Scandinavian journalist describes what TV was like under Saddam. On one channel, music videos feature action shots of Saddam firing guns in the air, greeting his subjects, and the like. On another channel, it's Saddam's greatest hits -- shots of him speaking at meetings, for example. The audio goes on when Saddam speaks. When someone else speaks, the tape plays soft violin music, only to switch to voices when Saddam talks again.

Elections don't separate democracies from dictatorships. As Fareed Zakaria argues in his book The Future of Freedom, permanent institutions and a system of checks and balances are the key to democracy. Without a check on popular elections -- a six-year-term Senate to cool the two-year vagrants in the House of Representatives; judicial review; advice and consent -- democracy is a mess.

Two things are shocking about the Bush Administration's domestic spying operation. The first, obvious shock is that it happened at all. I've got outrage fatigue to kill an elephant. That the president unilaterally and secretively ignored a federal law to approve spying on Americans
is criminal, period. Worse than Nixon; worse than Teapot Dome; worse than open graft and corruption. It's impeachable.

The second shock is the administration's defense of the program. I'm going to call it the Stalin Defense. The Stalin Defense is based on the presumption that the head of state knows best, and therefore should be trusted in all things. The institutions and separation of powers that Zakaria and the Federalist Papers view as essential safeguards in a polity don't matter.

The president tragically, hilariously attempted to explain how his power was checked in today's press conference. In response to a reporter's question (I think it was The Washington Post's Peter Baker, whose book The Breach is essential reading on Clinton's impeachment) the president asserted the following:

There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law, for starters. There is oversight. We're talking to Congress all the time, and on this program, to suggest there's unchecked power is not listening to what I'm telling you. I'm telling you, we have briefed the United States Congress on this program a dozen times.

This is an awesome responsibility to make decisions on behalf of the American people, and I understand that, Peter. And we'll continue to work with the Congress, as well as people within our own administration, to constantly monitor programs such as the one I described to you, to make sure that we're protecting the civil liberties of the United States. To say "unchecked power" basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the President, which I strongly reject.

Get it assholes? He took an oath, and anyone who takes an oath to uphold the law is pure and creamy and honest and will do the right thing with his "awesome responsibility." You take an oath, you can't be a dictator, and if someone calls you a dictator, your feelings get hurt.

Unsurprisingly, his assertions of Congressional oversight are a joke. Read Jay Rockefeller's handwritten letter to Dick Cheney dated July 17, 2003. Rockefeller has nice penmanship, and his concerns seem more immediate in the original handwriting. But in case you're impatient, here's the text:

I am writing to reiterate my concern regarding the sensitive intelligence issues we discussed today with the DCI, DIRNSA, and Chairman Roberts and our House Intelligence Committee counterparts.

Clearly the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues. As you know, I am neither a technician or an attorney. Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.

As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.

Without more information and the ability to draw on any independent legal or technical expertise, I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing we received.

I am retaining a copy of this letter in a sealed envelope in the secure spaces of the Senate Intelligence Committee to ensure that I have a record of this communication.

I appreciate your consideration of my views.

Most respectfully,

Jay Rockefeller

Congress has "checked" this power about as effectively as Michigan "checks" mobile quarterbacks. From Rockefeller's letter, it appears that a handful of senators and congressmen were invited to guess what the administration was thinking and left to fill in the blanks. At this point in time, the Rockefeller letter is like a corner of the Rosetta Stone, allowing for just enough decoding to get a small idea of what's going on here. Some excellent comments at TPM make note of the two things that jumped out at me: first, that Rockefeller was explicitly making a real-time record of this program in order to make clear the shoddiness of the briefing he received. Second, the allusion to not being "a technician" implies that this spying operation involves some sort of technological novelty outside of routine national security and law enforcement hardware.

Can I think up a situation where this kind of conduct is defensible? Maybe -- in the immediate months after 9/11, when there was no doubt an effort to put in place a flexible operation without the benefit of time or the luxury to experiment with new law enforcement arrangements.

The administration hasn't even come close to making that kind of case, and they haven't offered a linear, logical reason for why it's had to continue.

Instead, we get the Stalin Defense, which is based entirely on the premise that the president is trustworthy. For argument's sake, let's say that's true. He combines the vision of FDR, the fortitude of Lincoln, and the virtue of Jimmy Carter: that wouldn't change a thing. What worries me is that so much energy has been spent by people trying to take apart Bush (for understandable reasons) and defend Bush (often for unforgivable reasons) that the gravity of what he's done here will be overlooked. That is, the unilateral and brazen disregard of a federal law, running roughshod over two branches of government in the wildest executive power grab since Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

Historians generally regard the suspension of the writ as the biggest mistake of Lincoln's presidency. I imagine that Gore Vidal -- who views Lincoln as the man who brought about the rise of the military state and the end of the framers' vision of the republic -- would view Bush's conduct as a logical extension of Lincoln's conduct. But a key difference between Lincoln's suspension and Bush's spying operation is the transparency of the former and the secrecy of the latter.

In his press conference today, Bush stated that "an open debate about law would say to the enemy, here is what we're going to do." If that's not tantamount to letting the terrorists win, I don't know what is.

He has put into place a line of argument that would, in essence, make dispensable the elections, laws, and the other branches of government. It is premised entirely on crediting the virtue of one person and his inner circle. After all, he was sworn to enforce the law, and so long as he took that oath, there's no reason to question him.

I had started reading Sinclair Lewis's book It Can't Happen Here when this story broke last week. Published in 1935, Lewis's book is premised on the rise of a legally elected American dictator, along the lines of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Parts of the book don't track current events, but others are painfully, sometimes amusingly parallel with the conduct of this administration.

I've frequently found myself thinking that the primary thing separating this president from the mid-century fascists is a lack of ambition. Sometimes I find myself thankful that he doesn't have Reagan's silver tongue or the political mastery of LBJ. Imagine what would have happened if, instead of telling Americans to shop in response to 9/11, he had encouraged the formation of youth patriot brigades to hoist the American spirit and stand guard against terror. Thank God for small favors, right?