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VOL27NO7 50CENTS
‘In a dark time the eye begins to see ’
T IM E S
EA G LE
(MAY)JUNE 2006
-T H E O D O R E ROTHKE
THE ERROR OF MISPLACED CERTAINTY*
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
declares the office of Presidency and its vast apparatus of law,
intelligence gathering and especially its military ascendancy at
time of war, supreme over every other political, legal or public
organization. This regal pretense crowns Bush as king-emperor.
The theft o f the Presidency o f the United States by
a bom again Federalist Party is probably not the worst blow to
the disintegrating democracy but it is a major setpiece for a take
over o f constitutional government by a powerful minority that
from the very beginning o f the Republic has insisted that liberty
is the property of the elite and the rest o f the population must be
made to serve its interests.
These newly reconstructed Federalists share a
constrained interpretation o f the Constitution: its rights and
privileges belong to the wealthy and propertied, its dues and
obligations to everybody else. They would like to suspend the
Bill o f Rights and believe that what they call the ‘original intent'
o f the framers of the Constitution (who were all white propertied
and/or mercantile males) should be its only interpretation.
(NCTE, July 2002)
“The modem conservative is engaged in one o f man's oldest
exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior
moral justification for selfishness."
-JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1908-2006)
“The first and great commandment is: Don’t let them scare you."
-ELMER DAVIS
Readers of the Times Eagle have lately asked why the
same stuff over and over again. That is so true. The repetition is
dated from the day George W Bush and his sinisterly empirical
cabal usurped the Presidency. How many ways can the same
things be said; how many ways to write that the Bushites stole
power and have kept it through pathological pieties and pathet­
ically cloaked deception, and by rigged elections and contempt
for the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights? How often
must it be reiterated that these bullies are destroying our demo­
cracy for their own selfish and despotic reasons? The answer is
obvious: it should be said over and over again until we wake up
from this nightmare we have carelessly allowed to happen to
ourselves.
Frederick Douglass nearly a century and a half ago,
critical of President Abraham Lincoln’s wish to deport freed
blacks to Central America, deplored Lincoln's “canting hypocrisy”
— a good phrase that can cross the centuries and find a more
precise target at the current President’s “canting hypocrisy” on
every folly, blunder and deception that he inarticulates of his
inept and neo-despotic administration. Especially the major
goals for eternal Republican dominance of American politics
and society: criminal disregard of the environment, permanent
tax evaporation for the very rich, so-called Social Security reform
that would ultimately leave most of America's elderly penniless
and defenseless, the infamous and incessant corruption of his
corporate benefactors, the avaricious deceit of party allies who
shamelessly conspire to dismantle democracy in the name of
security and empire. His most egregious examples of canting
hypocrisy have been his brazen lies to invade Iraq (WMDs and
“liberation") and his denial/defense of torture he initiates.
Our democracy — what ever there is of it that remains
— has been highjacked, our long fought for and sought after
freedoms, liberties and justice for all contemptuously tramped
upon by a group of arrogantly avaricious schoolyard bullies that
has stampeded the citizenry with fear, recklessly usurped civil
rights and liberties, biliously deceived and forsaken the very
premise of free and open democracy.
We have allowed into political power the same kind of
people who were slave traders and owners from our dark past,
who would quite likely be Hitlers or Stalins in our future if we
don’t terminate their malevolent trajectory.
“The outlook of Richard Nixon was that he was above
the law," Lincoln Captan wrote in Yale Law School’s Legal
Affairs. “Watergate disabused him of the notion. The position
of George W. Bush is that he is a law unto himself." Nixon is
famous for having said, “When the President does it, it means
it is not illegal."
Although he owes the mean spirit of his Presidency to
Nixon and patriarchal predecessor Reagan/Bush, George Bush
compares himself to Lincoln and to FDR — but his Presidency
is much closer to Torquemada’s infamous Inquisition of earlier
centuries. GW plays the common man card, but as H. S. Bhaba
wrote in his exceptional and only novel Gestures, “with most
politicians... the common touch has been something vile and
specious."
Perhaps as an example of the problem of endlessly
attempting to vary depiction of the same ideas, here is how the
Bush era was described in an article I wrote for this newspaper
last year:
Like time and space is theorized to be, the Bush
administration might be considered emergent phenomena
— from the darkest malignancies o f perceived psychoses,
fundamentally capable o f perpetrating horrible inhumanities
which are after all particularly human however monstrous and
savage. They are predators o f an atavistic kind despite veils
o f theolitical pieties and righteousness, and they have hands
on the grotesquely destructive forces concocted by humanity
in its short bitter existence on this planet.
I might write now about the underlying realization that
these people mean harm, that they will indeed use nuclear
weapons in a cavalier manner: a self-fulfilling prophecy that
the end days of evangelical prophecy are here, so they will end
them. It almost seems, as anti-scientific as Bush personally
appears to be, that the rightwing Christians would rather go out
in a thermonuclear blaze of faith rather than be made aware
of increasing evidence that the Bible is fiction — that God and
humanity are not as depicted in the Good Book, nor for that
matter is any other myth cloaked as theology
•A mental state derived from alcohol intake cited by bartenders
and cocktail servers: from Michael Burgess, Uncle Mike's Guide
to Sex & Drinking: “This heady sense of freedom in the face of
a diminished capacity for reason is alcohol's great gift to the
human com edy"
The Bush administration is conspicuously flagrant in
its rapacious grab for power domestically and in the wider world.
It not only distrusts the common intelligence of the American
citizenry but generally regards it with fatuous contempt, shame­
lessly mismanaging its concerns in Orwellian doublethink —
and like oldtime Federalists the Bushites are confident that
a pompous, arrogant and self-serving elite are capable o f not
only ruling the people but faith-basing them also, saturating the
populace with propaganda and theolitical obscuration while
designing Kafkaesque laws to subdue (and punish) dissent or
insurrection. Despite major resistance to the USA Patriot Act,
the Bush cadre are reorganizing the United States into a militant
corporate theocracy under its patently unconstitutional edicts.
(NCTE, Marpril 2004)
STEVE ANSUL
The next paragraph of that same article:
But their emergent phenomena is also political, almost
predestined by the earlier Republican administrations o f Nixon
and Reagan/Bush who softened up the Constitutional process
for the second Bush to rape. Though disgraced, the Nixonians
prepared the way for Reaganomics, the onerous ideology of
rich over poor, and to religiously punish the poor for being poor.
This is the Republican revolution. Alexander Hamilton trounces
Thomas Jefferson, the essential and eternal struggle o f Ameri­
can democracy. Plutocratic aristocracy versus equality and
liberty. A belief in the manifest destiny of the United States
to be the ruling power o f Earth. The New World Order.
The credo of the Bush era can be summed up as: The
people with the most wealth don’t need civil rights or liberties.
The poor don’t deserve them.
The unelected President and his hard-right adminis­
tration o f corporate Tories are quite probably the people our
ancestors warned us against and tried to prevent their usurpation
of power with Constitutional government and separation of
powers — as well as the series o f initial addendums known as
the Bill o f Rights which clearly and concisely spell out the rights
and obligations o f the people.
President(-Select) Bush and his agents might have
been, if not harmless at least containable in peacetime, but now
war has set them loose on the Constitution and they are perhaps
the greatest danger this country faces, much more than the
terrorism they exploit as a shield and 'raison d'être' for annulling
the very freedoms they shamelessly pretend to protect
•
The issue is not whether the American people think
it is a good idea to deny or abrogate certain civil liberties but
whether the President can bypass Congress and dramatically
alter our legal system by him self— the unilateral dismember­
ment o f civil liberties and Presidential assault on due process
and Constitutional law in general
That was from December 2 00 1 .1 don’t know how often
or in how many variations I have written in these pages that our
revolutionary founders warned us about the coming of tyrants
like Bush and company, more concerned about domestic seizure
of power than foreign attempts, or how often in so many phrases
reminded that our first patriots were traitors.
The new term for arbitrary seizure of Presidential powers
is facetiously sculpted into a theory, termed unitary executive
theory (as if it has some sort of plausibility), which arbitrarily
9
The Cato Institute, in its recent report, Power Surge:
The Constitutional Record o f George IV. Bush, said of the
so-called “unitary executive" claim, “Under (the President's)
sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of every
American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White
House."
George W. and his cohorts started pushing the American
people around right away — Enron, a major backer of Bush from
his beginning as governor of Texas, celebrated the rapacious
new world order of Bush’s presidency by creating the West’s
energy shortage right after the first inauguration, stealing billions
from ratepayers; Bush bullied China when it shot down a U S.
reconnaissance plane flying over China; and Bush immediately
canceled the U.S.’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol designed
to eventually end global warming. From the very beginning the
Bushites have been arrogant and menacing. The old Cold War
belligerence was back.
George Bush is cocky, arrogant and about as crooked a
President the nation has ever had — add to that he was not even
elected although he claims to be the resurrection of Theodore
Roosevelt. Here might be an opportunity to examine Bush’s
sense of himself as a war hero, a ‘Rough Rider' in the image of
his fantasy mentor, although he actually is a deserter during time
of war from a cushy reserve pilot job that would never have put
him in combat (possible rumors that his Texas Air National
Guard unit might go to Vietnam could have precipitated his year­
long absence). Now as commander in chief of the United States
Armed Forces he has seized the power of a shogun or perhaps
more aptly that of a comic opera South American dictator self-
decorated with military awards of his own invention.
He deliberately and arrogantly flaunts as well as corrupts
international law, making war on another nation because it is
his will (and that of his handlers) to do so. He demonstrates
little concern for truth and dismisses the fact he lied the nation
into war. He aggressively ratchets up the old arms race with a
new generation of nuclear weapons, disregarding numerous
treaties designed over half a century to prevent such a possibility
(while berating Iran and North Korea for their attempts to develop
nuclear power in possible defense of his use of nuclear weapons
upon them). The Bushites are rapidly turning the USA into a
rogue nation and the world’s major nuclear terrorist.
George Bush is as perfidious a saboteur o f American
democracy as the enemies he inspires to attack the USA — and
just as radical Islamists claim for their own jihadism, he declares
he is selected by God to speak and act in His name; a dark,
proto-omnipotent vision o f retribution and intolerance, a harsh
unrelenting crusade against “evil" whether foreign or domestic
(evil as represented by non-Christians).
He and his cabal have instituted a massively sinister
apparatus o f domestic surveillance and police pervasion not
unlike the infamous Nazi Gestapo: hundreds o f FBI abuses
of these sanctioned Patriot A ct’ spy-upon-the-people powers
have been revealed but are dismissed as “administrative errors"
— torturing and murdering political prisoners is an unpardonable
and relatively useless method o f information but certainly effect­
ive as an instrument o f applied “counter” terrorism
This cabal has made a war that has killed possibly a half
million persons by now (2,000 Americans in Iraq), with no other
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