TYRANNY stalks America... Democrats dither. Bob Herbert, NYT
(sigh) Well, we are glad that BOB HERBERT of the New York Times is back on the side of the human race. B
Because back during the summer of the 2000 presidential elections, both Herbert and Maureen Dowd (the NY Times' token Black and female editorial commentators, respectively) were more than happy to jump on the BASH Clinton AND Gore bandwagon, thank you very much.
Herbert was, at the time, too taken with his own high-faulutin status in society to know an lynch-mob when it was not only operating under his nose, but all around him in the offices of his fellow writers for the New York Times. We can't recall which exact writters wrote the Times' WEN HO LEE reporting and "Whitewater" reporting - Risen and Gerth come to mind - but the Times was a member of the media consortium that was forced by a judicial ruling to pay Wen Ho Lee over $1million in damages for their atrocious, innuendo-based "China spying at Los Alamos!" 'reporting,' and authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons DEMOLISHED the Times' CHRONICALLY LYING Whitewater reporting in their book "The Hunting of the President." (Which google.)
By the summer of 2000, both Dowd and Herbert JOINED in the "get Clinton AND Gore" mob, because, face it, it was fun, cheap, and easy: a half hour spent digging up some dirt or innuendo on Gore, written up as a chatty, catty, witty little piece, and !PRESTO!, you've earned your weekly paycheck. (Which, in Dowd and Herbert's case, due to syndication, is probably enough to pay the monthly mortgage on a Manhatten 3 bedroom with plenty to spare.)
Herbert was TOO STUPID to realize that the REAL Righty HATRED of Bill Clinton - tens of thousands upon millions of Americans back then proudly signed on to the label "CLINTON HATERS!" - was NOT brought about by Clinton's womanizing or draft dodging. You see, ALL FOUR Bush (H.W.) and Barbara sons DODGED the Vietnam War.. as did Gingrich, DeLay, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Frist, Lott, and dozens of other right-wing favored 'leaders.'
And it wasn't even Clinton's WOMANIZING that earned him the spite and hatred of millions of Americans - as everyone knows, over 50% of "Red state" marriages end in divorce (higher than the "Blue state" average), and out there in Bubba-Americaland marital fidelity is never a sure thing (at least if Country Music crooning about cheating hearts and lying spouses is any indication). On top of those general observations, Right-Wing icon and object of pride STROM THURMOND, REALLY DID grope female staffers on Capitol Hill - he was infamous for it, and women routinely made sure they did not get in too close a proximity to the Senior Senator from South Carolina. And Thurmond REALLY DID father a child of a Black mother, out of wedlock, the family's African-American maid. Indeed, the young woman was not even 16 at the time she became pregnant with Thurmond's child, which makes Thurmond a statutory rapist. Groper, Rapist, Draft-Dodger, pork-barrel tax-and-spenders.... EVERY charge that a Righty could throw at Bill Clinton, is TRUE IN SPADES of a least one well-known and respected Right-Wing leader or another.
NO, BILL CLINTON'S sins and "crimes" in Righty-world was THAT HE FAVORED THE CIVIL RIGHTS and VOTING RIGHTS bills of 1964 and 1965 (respectivley), AND ALL THE OTHER progressive, "liberal" measures of the 1950s, '60s, and 70's that Right-Wing "conservatives" so despise.
From birth control to voting rights to women's rights to federal oversight of public schools, elections, pollution, and creating a barrier to state-supported proslytizing (i.e. prohibiting the establishment of a favored religion by a given state or locality), the Righties were AGHAST that things had changed since the good ol' days of the 1900s to 1920s.
And Bob Herbert, urbane, sophisticated, independent, high-muckety-muck op-ed writer of the New York Times - read and debated around the nation, if not world - BOUGHT INTO the Right-Wing smear-mob of Gore and Clinton, as in "How bad can George W. Bush, inexperienced Governor of Texas, be if he is elected president?"
Well, today (if not long ago), BOB HERBERT HAS FINALLY GOT his answer to that question: Mr. Bush and his White House are, in Herbert's own words, "TYRANNY ON THE MARCH."
SINCE Bob Herbert piled on the "George W. Bush is a regular guy.. Al Bore is a stick in the mud" summer of 2000, Mr. Bush HAS ADDED TWO SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Alito is an unabashed Scalia-clone jurists, which is to say an unrepetent throwback to the Borgia and Medici Popes, with their ability to foster conspiracies, wage wars, and even burn opposition leaders (such as Savonarola, even if he might have deserved a taste of his own medicine) at the stake.
Well, welcome to REALITY, Mr. Herbert, it's nice to see you back on the side of democracy, progress, and civil (much less human) rights.
Oh, and Mr. Herbert...? IF you want the one-stop source on just how low the Bush administration will go.. just how cruel is their version of "freedom" and "justice", then get and read Michael Lind's book "Made in Texas, George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." You will learn that today's right-wing Texas Republicans are the direct, lineal descendents of the resource-extraction, subservient labor, hierarchical, militaristic, jingoistic plantation lord autocrats of the Confederate era slavery economy, with their social premiums on conformity, violence, autocratic leadership, and above all, subservient minority labor. You will learn that the Texas Confederate Army MASSACRED the "True der Union" Union volunteers in West Texas, and that the belt around from Houston to Waco to Texas has long been a hotbed of plantation economies, lynchings, and fundamentalist, anti-intellectual religious cults.
THAT, Mr. Herbert, is the agenda that you and Maureen Dowd helped EMPOWER in the 2000 election (with, of course, more than a little help from Mr. Gore, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Nader, and the "Greens," "Enviros," and "lefty-librul Democrats" themselves).
The Definition of Tyranny
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Published: July 17, 2006
Congress is dithering and the American public doesn't even seem particularly concerned as the administration of George W. Bush systematically trashes such fundamental American values as justice, due process, respect for human rights and submission to the rule of law.
In the kangaroo courts that the administration concocted to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a defendant could be prevented from seeing the evidence against him, would not have the right to attend his own trial and would not have the right to appeal the sentence to a civilian court.
That's slapstick justice, a process worthy of the Marx Brothers.
"You have been accused of being a terrorist."
"Where is the evidence?"
"We can't show it to you."
"That's ridiculous."
"So is this court. We find you guilty. Take him away."
The Supreme Court now says, in a vote that was closer than it should have been, that this sort of madness cannot be permitted. In its recent decision striking down the tribunals for terror suspects at Guantánamo, the court said of the defendant, Salim Ahmed Hamdan: "He will be, and indeed already has been, excluded from his own trial."
The court said, in effect, that this is not the American way, that ours is not a Marx Brothers republic. Not yet, anyway. (It most likely will be if Mr. Bush gets to appoint one or two more justices to the court.)
The Bush-Cheney regime believes it can do whatever outlandish things it wants, including torturing people and keeping them incarcerated for life without even the semblance of due process. And it's not giving up. The administration now wants Congress to authorize what the Supreme Court has plainly said was wrong. White House lawyers, in a torturous (pun intended) interpretation of the court's ruling, seem to be arguing that the kangaroo courts, otherwise known as military commissions, will be quite all right if only Congress will say so.
They're not all right. They're an abomination (like the secret C.I.A. prisons and the practice of extraordinary rendition) that spits in the face of the idea that the United States is a great and civilized nation.
"Can you imagine if the Hamdan decision, among others, had gone the other way?" said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been waging an extraordinary fight to secure basic legal protections for prisoners at Guantánamo. "I mean we'd be looking at a dark nightmare."
The court's decision brought into sharp relief the importance of one of the most fundamental aspects of American government, the separation of powers. Checks and balances. The judicial branch put a halt — a check — on a gruesomely illegal practice by the executive.
Mr. Bush has tried to scrap the very idea of checks and balances. The Republican-controlled Congress has, for the most part, rolled over like trained seals for the president. And Mr. Bush is trying mightily to pack the courts with right-wingers who will do the same. Under those circumstances, his will becomes law.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion in the Hamdan case, referred to a seminal quote from James Madison. The entire quote is as follows: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
As the center noted in a recent report, "The U.S. government has employed every possible tactic to evade judicial review of its detention and interrogation practices in the Œwar on terror,' including allegations that U.S. personnel subject prisoners to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
There is every reason to be alarmed about the wretched road that Bush, Cheney et al. are speeding along. It is as if they were following a route deliberately designed to undermine a great nation.
A lot of Americans are like spoiled rich kids who take their wealth for granted. Too many of us have forgotten — or never learned — the real value of the great American ideals. Too many are standing silently by as Mr. Bush and his cronies engage in the kind of tyrannical and uncivilized behavior that has brought so much misery — and ultimately ruin — to previous societies.
Because back during the summer of the 2000 presidential elections, both Herbert and Maureen Dowd (the NY Times' token Black and female editorial commentators, respectively) were more than happy to jump on the BASH Clinton AND Gore bandwagon, thank you very much.
Herbert was, at the time, too taken with his own high-faulutin status in society to know an lynch-mob when it was not only operating under his nose, but all around him in the offices of his fellow writers for the New York Times. We can't recall which exact writters wrote the Times' WEN HO LEE reporting and "Whitewater" reporting - Risen and Gerth come to mind - but the Times was a member of the media consortium that was forced by a judicial ruling to pay Wen Ho Lee over $1million in damages for their atrocious, innuendo-based "China spying at Los Alamos!" 'reporting,' and authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons DEMOLISHED the Times' CHRONICALLY LYING Whitewater reporting in their book "The Hunting of the President." (Which google.)
By the summer of 2000, both Dowd and Herbert JOINED in the "get Clinton AND Gore" mob, because, face it, it was fun, cheap, and easy: a half hour spent digging up some dirt or innuendo on Gore, written up as a chatty, catty, witty little piece, and !PRESTO!, you've earned your weekly paycheck. (Which, in Dowd and Herbert's case, due to syndication, is probably enough to pay the monthly mortgage on a Manhatten 3 bedroom with plenty to spare.)
Herbert was TOO STUPID to realize that the REAL Righty HATRED of Bill Clinton - tens of thousands upon millions of Americans back then proudly signed on to the label "CLINTON HATERS!" - was NOT brought about by Clinton's womanizing or draft dodging. You see, ALL FOUR Bush (H.W.) and Barbara sons DODGED the Vietnam War.. as did Gingrich, DeLay, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Frist, Lott, and dozens of other right-wing favored 'leaders.'
And it wasn't even Clinton's WOMANIZING that earned him the spite and hatred of millions of Americans - as everyone knows, over 50% of "Red state" marriages end in divorce (higher than the "Blue state" average), and out there in Bubba-Americaland marital fidelity is never a sure thing (at least if Country Music crooning about cheating hearts and lying spouses is any indication). On top of those general observations, Right-Wing icon and object of pride STROM THURMOND, REALLY DID grope female staffers on Capitol Hill - he was infamous for it, and women routinely made sure they did not get in too close a proximity to the Senior Senator from South Carolina. And Thurmond REALLY DID father a child of a Black mother, out of wedlock, the family's African-American maid. Indeed, the young woman was not even 16 at the time she became pregnant with Thurmond's child, which makes Thurmond a statutory rapist. Groper, Rapist, Draft-Dodger, pork-barrel tax-and-spenders.... EVERY charge that a Righty could throw at Bill Clinton, is TRUE IN SPADES of a least one well-known and respected Right-Wing leader or another.
NO, BILL CLINTON'S sins and "crimes" in Righty-world was THAT HE FAVORED THE CIVIL RIGHTS and VOTING RIGHTS bills of 1964 and 1965 (respectivley), AND ALL THE OTHER progressive, "liberal" measures of the 1950s, '60s, and 70's that Right-Wing "conservatives" so despise.
From birth control to voting rights to women's rights to federal oversight of public schools, elections, pollution, and creating a barrier to state-supported proslytizing (i.e. prohibiting the establishment of a favored religion by a given state or locality), the Righties were AGHAST that things had changed since the good ol' days of the 1900s to 1920s.
And Bob Herbert, urbane, sophisticated, independent, high-muckety-muck op-ed writer of the New York Times - read and debated around the nation, if not world - BOUGHT INTO the Right-Wing smear-mob of Gore and Clinton, as in "How bad can George W. Bush, inexperienced Governor of Texas, be if he is elected president?"
Well, today (if not long ago), BOB HERBERT HAS FINALLY GOT his answer to that question: Mr. Bush and his White House are, in Herbert's own words, "TYRANNY ON THE MARCH."
SINCE Bob Herbert piled on the "George W. Bush is a regular guy.. Al Bore is a stick in the mud" summer of 2000, Mr. Bush HAS ADDED TWO SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Alito is an unabashed Scalia-clone jurists, which is to say an unrepetent throwback to the Borgia and Medici Popes, with their ability to foster conspiracies, wage wars, and even burn opposition leaders (such as Savonarola, even if he might have deserved a taste of his own medicine) at the stake.
Well, welcome to REALITY, Mr. Herbert, it's nice to see you back on the side of democracy, progress, and civil (much less human) rights.
Oh, and Mr. Herbert...? IF you want the one-stop source on just how low the Bush administration will go.. just how cruel is their version of "freedom" and "justice", then get and read Michael Lind's book "Made in Texas, George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." You will learn that today's right-wing Texas Republicans are the direct, lineal descendents of the resource-extraction, subservient labor, hierarchical, militaristic, jingoistic plantation lord autocrats of the Confederate era slavery economy, with their social premiums on conformity, violence, autocratic leadership, and above all, subservient minority labor. You will learn that the Texas Confederate Army MASSACRED the "True der Union" Union volunteers in West Texas, and that the belt around from Houston to Waco to Texas has long been a hotbed of plantation economies, lynchings, and fundamentalist, anti-intellectual religious cults.
THAT, Mr. Herbert, is the agenda that you and Maureen Dowd helped EMPOWER in the 2000 election (with, of course, more than a little help from Mr. Gore, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Nader, and the "Greens," "Enviros," and "lefty-librul Democrats" themselves).
The Definition of Tyranny
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Published: July 17, 2006
Congress is dithering and the American public doesn't even seem particularly concerned as the administration of George W. Bush systematically trashes such fundamental American values as justice, due process, respect for human rights and submission to the rule of law.
In the kangaroo courts that the administration concocted to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a defendant could be prevented from seeing the evidence against him, would not have the right to attend his own trial and would not have the right to appeal the sentence to a civilian court.
That's slapstick justice, a process worthy of the Marx Brothers.
"You have been accused of being a terrorist."
"Where is the evidence?"
"We can't show it to you."
"That's ridiculous."
"So is this court. We find you guilty. Take him away."
The Supreme Court now says, in a vote that was closer than it should have been, that this sort of madness cannot be permitted. In its recent decision striking down the tribunals for terror suspects at Guantánamo, the court said of the defendant, Salim Ahmed Hamdan: "He will be, and indeed already has been, excluded from his own trial."
The court said, in effect, that this is not the American way, that ours is not a Marx Brothers republic. Not yet, anyway. (It most likely will be if Mr. Bush gets to appoint one or two more justices to the court.)
The Bush-Cheney regime believes it can do whatever outlandish things it wants, including torturing people and keeping them incarcerated for life without even the semblance of due process. And it's not giving up. The administration now wants Congress to authorize what the Supreme Court has plainly said was wrong. White House lawyers, in a torturous (pun intended) interpretation of the court's ruling, seem to be arguing that the kangaroo courts, otherwise known as military commissions, will be quite all right if only Congress will say so.
They're not all right. They're an abomination (like the secret C.I.A. prisons and the practice of extraordinary rendition) that spits in the face of the idea that the United States is a great and civilized nation.
"Can you imagine if the Hamdan decision, among others, had gone the other way?" said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been waging an extraordinary fight to secure basic legal protections for prisoners at Guantánamo. "I mean we'd be looking at a dark nightmare."
The court's decision brought into sharp relief the importance of one of the most fundamental aspects of American government, the separation of powers. Checks and balances. The judicial branch put a halt — a check — on a gruesomely illegal practice by the executive.
Mr. Bush has tried to scrap the very idea of checks and balances. The Republican-controlled Congress has, for the most part, rolled over like trained seals for the president. And Mr. Bush is trying mightily to pack the courts with right-wingers who will do the same. Under those circumstances, his will becomes law.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion in the Hamdan case, referred to a seminal quote from James Madison. The entire quote is as follows: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
As the center noted in a recent report, "The U.S. government has employed every possible tactic to evade judicial review of its detention and interrogation practices in the Œwar on terror,' including allegations that U.S. personnel subject prisoners to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
There is every reason to be alarmed about the wretched road that Bush, Cheney et al. are speeding along. It is as if they were following a route deliberately designed to undermine a great nation.
A lot of Americans are like spoiled rich kids who take their wealth for granted. Too many of us have forgotten — or never learned — the real value of the great American ideals. Too many are standing silently by as Mr. Bush and his cronies engage in the kind of tyrannical and uncivilized behavior that has brought so much misery — and ultimately ruin — to previous societies.
posted by verifi at 4:16 PM
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