Here's how the Bush administration has abandoned American democracy

Attorney Jack Balkin has written an interesting analysis of how the Supreme Court has smacked down the Bush administrations severe, even tyrannical, overreach in the wake of 9/11. (I'm going to convert his paragraph to bullet points.)

Following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush and his supporters proposed a significant chance in constitutional norms, centered around increased presidential power to fight the war on terror. This vision included

• (1) a doctrine of preemptive war,
• (2) new surveillance techniques, including domestic surveillance,
• (3) a new system of preventive detention, including detention of american citizens without access to courts,
• (4) the creation of legal black holes like Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites,
• (5) use of torture and torture-lite to obtain information,
• (6) enhanced secrecy and classification policies, and
• (7) a version of unitary executive theory that claimed that Congress could not constitutionally limit the President when he claimed to act under his powers as Commander-in-Chief. The last idea was also articulated in
• (8) the expansion of the use of constitutional signing statements, in which the President would state that he would disregard certain features of laws passed by Congress without telling the public any details about the scope or extent of his non-enforcement.

The Bush Administration sought to cement this new constitutional vision to the already regnant version of movement conservatism. It sought to reorient the conservative movement away from primarily domestic concerns after the fall of Communism and toward a focus on a muscular foreign policy and unilateral Presidentialism. This was not hard to do for two reasons: first, American conservatism needed to replace its focus on anti-Communism with a new set of foreign policy goals, pursued with equal fervor. Second, some of the theoretical moves undergirding Bush's vision of the Presidency on steroids had already been articulated in the Reagan Administration.

By 2008, we can say that this attempt at a constitutional revolution has failed. The Supreme Court resisted the Administration's attempts to get it to legitimate the new regime.

The only thing I could add to that is that the Supreme Court only barely overrode Bush's Constitutional revolution. Four of the nine justices dissented in overriding it in highly intemperate language.

If anyone wants to keep America true to the vision held by the founding fathers after the Revolution of 1776 this effort by conservatives has to be spiked throughly and then continually fought against. Had Justice Kennedy sided with the tyrannical Catholic Justices, the next step could well have required violent revolution to reverse the series of really, really bad ideas Bush has been implementing with the help of the likes of John Yoo.

Modern conservatism simply doesn't work. For Conservatives to maintain power in the face of their obvious and frequent failures (over and above their penchant for corruption), they have to prevent free speech that exposes their failures and then eliminate democracy and implement a single all-powerful executive supported by one-party rule. That's what those attempted changes in Constitutional norms are all about. Not defending America, but maintaining Conservative power.

The Supreme Court decision handed them a set-back, but it was a near thing depending on a majority of only a single Supreme Court Justice.

That's too close, and it's only temporary. The next stage of the battle is the Presidential election between Obama, representing traditional American democracy and McCain who supports further moves towards the militaristic autocratic King McCain wielding the power of the Unitary Executive described by John Yoo under the guidance of Dick Cheney and handed off by Cheney to John McCain if he can.

Faith is personal; Politics is public; Personal faith cannot make public political decisions in a democracy

It's political season again, and the Christian evangelical politicians are back to making their claims that somehow atheists and liberals are trying to force "Christians" out of American public life.

What it their evidence for this? Well, they define "Christian" as "someone who believes what I do." Then they are motivated by their "Faith" (whatever variety it is) to enter politics where public decision-making occurs. When they do, they find that a great many people who don't believe as they do, and those others also don't think that their personal Faith automatically trumps any other Faith or secular reasoning that participates in the public decision-making process. The so-called "Christian" evangelical politicians think they must be given control of the public decisions because of their personal faith. They know they are right and everyone else is wrong because their God is The God and no one else has any truth to support their views.

I consider myself a Christian and person of Faith; and I do not recognize the strange doctrines of the so-called self-described "Christian" fundamentalists and evangelists as being either Christian or even true "Faith." Since I am neither an evangelist for my personal Faith, nor am I searching for a teacher in the murky waters of fundamentalism (Christian or otherwise), my personal religious beliefs is not open to discussion with politicians or evangelists. Nor do I want to convert any fundamentalists from what I consider their heresy of Christianity. The issue is simply not open to discussion at anyone else's instigation. My beliefs and my faith are my business, as yours are your business. Period. End. Full stop.

That said, I can respect that the personal faith that others have motivates them into the public arena to participate in the political process of public decision-making. The key point everyone must recognize is that a person's Faith is a personal decision, not to be interfered with against that person's will. But a person's faith does not give him or her priority in public decision-making, either. That is a form of authoritarian government called "Theocracy" which has no place in a Republic.

People of faith have every right to enter the public decision-making process that we call politics. In a Republic they must be allowed to vote, to speak freely, and to run for office as the preacher Mike Huckabee has done and is doing, and as Jessie Jackson did in the past. Their personal faith should be respected because it apparently motivates them to work for the good of society and the nation.

Or so they say. The problem with personal faith in politics is that we have only the individuals unsupported word for what it is, what it means, that he or she even has it, or that it truly motivates him or her over other motivations. No one knows what another person's faith really means. The only real public evidence is their word for it. There is no external evidence that a televangelist acts out of faith or out of desire to live the high life on donations from the suckers, for example. We have only their word for their faith and its motivating power, and many of us see the behavior of such persons living in great wealth and doubt - but do not know - that we are seeing faith at work.

A lot of people may agree on what they say is their personal faith and say they share it with others, but that still boils down to each person, who does not know any more of what is in an other's heart, vouching for what is in some other person's heart. So they wave a copy of the Bible (or some other holy book - the Koran or the Book of Mormon, for example) and claim that it is the revealed word of God so that it must be the truth. Is it truly the revealed word of some entity labeled - in the limited symbology of human language which clearly cannot embrace the infinite - is it truly from "God"? How do we know? Someone else tells us so. Based on that witness, we can either accept it on faith or not, but it is still nothing more than someone else telling us that it is true. Whether we accept that witness is a personal decision.

It is not disrespect of another's faith to say that when they express it in the political decision-making process and try to make it the law of government, others apply their own beliefs and faith and reject their beliefs as government policy. The expression of private faith by one person does not automatically become public policy in the face of disagreement, but that disagreement does not challenge their personal faith. Being unwilling to enshrine one person's private faith as public policy does not diminish that private faith. It merely means that the secular arguments needed to convince people who have a different and conflicting private faith or beliefs will not accept what is, after all, merely faith and not rational as guide for public government policy. The description "merely" applies only in the realm of public decision-making and has nothing to do with the power of the faith to the individual who professes it.

Public political decisions in a democratic Republic cannot be made because one person declares that their faith demands it. Such decisions, based on the totally personal faith of one individual, or even a small group, is what John Locke called arbitrary decisions. He then explained that a democratic nation must operate under the Rule of Law. Government based on arbitrary decisions is authoritarianism, not democracy.

Protecting democracy from the arbitrary personal decisions made by individuals motivated by their personal faith does not disrespect their personal faith. It only acknowledges that public decisions have to be made by political means using persuasion rather than the arbitrary command that faith demands that government act a certain way.

The political process is a set of procedures we use to make public decisions for government. European history has clearly demonstrated the danger of basing government decisions on the arbitrary commands of a few who claim that their faith requires the government act certain ways ways and refuse to listen to those who disagree. When those who profess one personal faith control government and declare that those who reject their government decisions are heretics are setting up the basis for a revolution or war. The declaration that government serves those who hold one faith and rejects those who hold another faith undercuts the very legitimacy of that government. None of us accept being taxed by government to support someone else's personal beliefs.

So the solution that has worked is that government must not intrude on personal religious faith unless it presents a clear public secular threat. The public decision-making process must not be allowed to reject any person because of their personal religious beliefs, but those beliefs are permitted, even expected, to motivate individuals to enter the public decision process we call politics. But the decisions made by government officials much be based on reasons other than someone's personal faith, and must be approved by a large cross-section of individuals throughout the nation.

The religious politicians appear not to understand the very basis of democratic public decision-making in a Republic. The religious politicians are trying to use alleged threats to the personal faith of their followers as motivation to spread their personal faith to control government even when the majority of the population objects. They want to eliminate the very basis of democracy and put the government back into the arbitrary decision-making based on the personal faith of government leaders, and they declare that anyone who opposes their destruction of the Constitution and democracy is a liberal, secularist or atheist and is attempting to somehow marginalize their personal faith.

This is not a religious battle. It is a political battle in which religious organizations are being coopted as part of the political machinery. The religious politicians must be stopped. And they will be. This is the essence of the truth of separation of Church and State. Church is personal, and state is public.

The public truth is that America is not a religious theocracy which allows private religious faith the preempt public democratic decision-making. America is a democratic Republic and the basic law of the land is the U.S. Constitution.

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That's my view. See also Michael Berube's article Skepticism about Faith, which clarified my thoughts on religion in politics. If we disagree, then I stand behind what I wrote above.

Money from USA to Musharraf is unaudited cash

Josh Marshall point out that the more than $10 billion America has given to Pakistan since 9/11 has been given directly to Pervez Musharraf without any strings or audits. Is there any doubt that it has been used to build Musharraf's patronage network? That means that America has been propping up Musharraf's dictatorship practically since his takeover coup in 1999.

Clearly money is power. How could the US Supreme Court declare it to be merely "political speech" under the Constitution, I wonder?

Paving the road to an authoritarian government

Amitai Etzioni provides the description of what is needed to achieve a liberal democratic government.

First, there must be an effective government. Why?

Most importantly, political development can thrive only after basic security is established first.

Government exists first to provide security for the people.

Let me add: As long as the government effectively provides security and stability in the face of apparent strong threats, most people will accept that the cost of government in terms of graft, corruption and injustice can be pretty high, because the absence of security in terms of deadly violence, maiming, and torture is itself extremely expensive. So what if the cop on the beat is corrupt as long as he protects most middle class and especially wealthy people from muggings, robberies and murder?

In his response to Robert Kagan's article Dr. Etzioni describes what elements and institutions - in addition to and after security and stability - are required to achieve a liberal democracy.

Robert Kagan’s argument that “free elections come first” (Washington Post, Oct 28) is based on an elementary logical fallacy: that two negatives make one positive. Kagan shows that sheer economic development does not pave the way to democratization (see China). Furthermore, he demonstrates that the rule of law—by which he means a fair, even handed law, not the one that protects people from violence, terror, and anarchy (see China)—cannot be established in non-democratic nations. However, it does not follow, as he suggests, that free elections per se can produce a liberal democracy.

Democratic history shows that political development must include

• freeing of the press,
  
• the introduction of competitive political parties,
  
• a growing middle class, and
  
• increasing respect for a fair law,
  

in addition to free elections—all of these measures have to be introduced more or less simultaneously, albeit gradually (See the US, Western Europe, and India).

When free elections do come first, as Kagan wishes, we see the election of the representatives of terrorist organizations (e.g., Hamas), unstable governments and failing states (in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan), increasingly authoritarian governments (e.g., Russia ), and the rise of populist movements but not liberal democracy (e.g., Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan).
[I have reformatted Dr. Etzioni's writing with bullet points - Editor WTF-o]

This article is a welcome antidote to the simplistic idea that all you need for democracy is free elections.

Is it becoming clear what the Bush administration did the democracy thing wrong in Iraq after the misbegotten, understaffed, poorly planned and unnecessary invasion? It should be obvious from reading the above quotation.

Democracy is a lot more than just getting voters into a voting booth. If you get frightened voters who do not feel the government is providing security and stability, they will use the power of the vote to elect the candidates who promise the most extreme remedies.

Leaders, be they government leaders or leaders of corporations and private organizations, do not like to be interfered with by overseers. It complicates their job. In politican-speak that means that the overseers won't let the leader "Be efficient." "Being efficient" means that the leader simplifies the situation by ignoring many bad side effects of his actions. Those side effects usually cause more difficulties than the problem the leader was trying to solve. Democracy is an institution that allows all the effected groups to voice their opinions before they get hurt by intemperate and hasty government actions. Those groups who are being damaged by the government actions become opponents of the government.

A government leader who promises the most extreme measured to ensure security and stability will also, by their very nature, use the most extreme measures to eliminated political opposition their rule. Many of those extreme measures include eliminating or censoring press organizations which publicly disagree with them and, if possible, eliminating opposition parties.

This is done by the government in the name of providing safety and security to the nation. What it actually does is eliminate the approved methods of democratic conflict, forcing the opponents to themselves use more extreme measures. The government then responds with even more extreme measures. The downward spiral away from democratic government is obvious. If the voting population is sufficiently frightened and insecure, then the sacrifice of democracy for safety is easy to justify.

Without this mechanism, George W. Bush could have never justified invading Iraq, nor would he have been elected in 2004. Nor could he justify the use of torture, abandoning habeas corpus, abandoning the Rule of Law (which is what the theory of the Unitary Executive does) or conducting warrantless wiretaps on anyone the government decides they want to monitor.

Even with this fear-of-insecurity-and-instability mechanism working for him, Bush has had to resort to operating the government in secret so that the the American voting public does not know what he is doing. He claims that things like torture, warrantless wiretaps, abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo are justified, but refuses to respond to Congressional requests for the documents that purport to be the legal justification for those actions.

Then, to top it all off, Bush has not delivered on the promise to make us more secure. His intemperate, extreme and thoughtless actions have created more enemies for America than they have eliminated. His thoughtless fiscal actions have set America up for the next recession, one which will be a doozy. Bush has also destroyed the effectiveness of our Army and Marine Corps, including the Reserves and National Guard, obviously damaging our national security.

In short, in his ignorance, ineptitude and extremism, Bush promised us greater security, and America had paid the price for his undelivered promises in greater insecurity. Instead of giving us greater security, Bush (and Cheney) have been paving the way for an Authoritarian government in America. But Bush isn't the end of the story.

Rudy Giuliani wants more of the same, just more extreme and less rational. Giuliani is America's answer to Benito Mussolini, another prime example of an extremist politician who took power by promising to provide safety and security to the population.

Mussolini, like Bush and Giuliani, also promised to run a more efficient government - "Make the trains run on time" - and like Bush, he too failed. Giuliani's efficiency can be measured in the effectiveness of the radios the New York Firemen carried into the World Trade Center. The commanders could not communicate with them to recall the firemen before the collapse of the WTC. This was seven years after Giuliani was informed of the problem with the radios and had promised to replace them. Rudy's corrupt dealings with Motorola prevented the replacement of those radios, so over 200 New York firemen died needlessly in the collapse of the WTC.

So do we Americans want to abandon our democracy because some extremists are promising that their extremism will provide us greater security and more efficient government? If so, then vote Republican. But recognize that Bush was elected on that promise, and has failed to deliver. And it's not just Bush. Rudy Giuliani is, if anything, more extreme, more authoritarian and less effective running government than Bush and Cheney have proven to be.

Voting Republican in 2008 is the direct route route to more authoritarian, more corrupt, more expensive, and less effective government.

The unethical unconstitutional radical so-called 'conservative' Republicans

Digby writes about the way conservative Republicans have gradually removed any hint of ethics in American elections whenever and wherever they can. Nixon was the first great example, followed by the secret deal between Republicans and the Iranian groups who held the American Embassy personnel until after the 1980 election so as to ensure the defeat of Carter.

The partisan idiocy that was the impeachment of Bill Clinton followed, but after that came the presidential election of 2000 in which Justice Scalia not only contributed the fifth vote to stop the Florida recounts, he specifically said when he did it "The Constitution does not guarantee a free vote."

I don't think any of us knew just how jarring that assault would be until the election of 2000, when an attack on the vote became quite direct. Al Gore was the winner of the popular vote and the intended winner of Florida's electoral college vote. It was close. But regardless of the Republican mantras about hanging chads and "divining the will of the voters," from the first moments of the election controversy there was no doubt that the butterfly ballot in Miami caused people to vote in error and if that hadn't happened, Al Gore would have been the clear winner in Florida. The intention of the voters was clear, even if the technical difficulties in rectifying it weren't. We know who the voters chose.

But the Republicans cared nothing for the intention of the voters and didn't even want to count the votes that might have legitimized their own man's victory. They used every mechanism and lever of power at their disposal in spite of the fact that they knew they hadn't really won. And they knew we knew they hadn't really won. That a strictly partisan 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court ratified that maneuver was perhaps one of the most shocking attacks on the spirit of American democracy yet. Supreme Court Justice Scalia even made a point of saying that there was no right to vote in the constitution, which is true. But I don't think many Americans believed before that day that a Supreme Court justice would use that fact as a way to justify installing a man in the presidency who hadn't been the people's choice. Now we know.

(See also The Dallas Examiner.)

Then followed the removal of the elected California Governor.

California followed with a GOP financed recall election of the Democratic Governor, a radical departure from the past where recalls had been understood to be used only to remove criminals from office, not truncate the term of a duly elected executive simply because the political conditions allowed you to do it. Interestingly, this sort of radical direct democracy had been endorsed by that old rock-ribbed conservative Karl Marx, when he wrote favorably about the recall provisions of the Paris Commune. One would say this was a matter of strange bedfellows, but these modern Republicans studied communism with fervor and came to admire many of its adherents' political tactics. And in any case, it was a matter of political opportunity rather than philosophy. They would just as easily argue the opposite case. Their philosophy is to take power, period.

All of this is just about elections. They govern in the same way, as laid out in Charlie Savage's new book "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy."

As Charlie Savage points out, this administration has been centralizing power into the Presidency. It doesn't matter who holds the Presidency. The forms of power that the Bush - Cheney administration have pulled into the Executive Branch will be there for any future President to use. I don't think they every intended for Democrats to again elected and install a President, but it would be a great irony if the powers that Cheney (in particular) have pulled into the Presidency were used against the Republicans in the same ways Republicans have been using them against Democrats for the last eight years.

Irony may provide a level of justice, but I'm not sure we want to keep on living in the America the Re[publicans have been building.

My apologies to those looking for posts here.

Both of you. ;-}

I've been running an early election poll 13 hours a day since Thursday, and will be continuing through Tuesday, so it has been a question of sleeping or reading and writing here. Then I'll do the same thing for the regular election next Saturday.

It's an election for mayor and city council, with a single amendment to the Texas Constitution setting a cap on property taxes for the aged and disabled added, so it is low-key at best. But someone has to operate the polls, and I'm one of them.

Unfortunately, it keeps me from being here.

Which reminds me - make sure that you are registered! Now! Call and check.

Send in for for a replacement certificate if you can't locate yours! Don't let yourself be disenfranchised! Make sure that every Democrat you know is registered!

How do you create an authoritarian state out of a democracy? Easy. Ten steps.

Naomi Wolf discusses what is required to take down a democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government in the Guardian.

If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. [Snip]

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Let me provide just an overview of her excellent article:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - "war footing"; a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation"; terrorists. (But terrorism is a technique of fighting, not an identifiable enemy.)


2. Create a gulag - Guantánamo Bay; The CIA's secret gulag. Prison camps in isolated locations for "illegal immigrants."


3. Develop a thug caste - Blackwater and other security firms deployed in New Orleans. Privately run and staffed prisons. The Republican thugs who shut down the vote recount in Miami in 2000.


4. Set up an internal surveillance system - The secret program to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions; Uncontrolled National Security Letters that include a total gag order on the people who have to turn over the documents, like librarians, booksellers, income tax preparers, etc.


5. Harass citizens' groups - Infiltrate and investigate organizations like Churches and Environmental organizations. IRS investigations to remove tax exempt status of churches that oppose Bush while giving funding to those churches that support Bush.


6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - The ways to get on the No-Fly list are completely arbitrary, while there are no known ways to get off. Any citizen or other person in the U.S. can be arrested, declared an “enemy combatant” and refused all access to an attorney, the courts, or habeas corpus. The federal government is not even required to tell people who inquire if you have been detains, or if so, where. This is outside the law, by definition it is arbitrary at the whim of the individual who decided to detain you.


7. Target key individuals - The U.S. Attorneys fired in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre are an example.


8. Control the press - See Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses and Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report.


9. Dissent equals treason - "Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage". Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"." [*]
   
   Just listen to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the commenters on Little Green Footballs.


10. Suspend the rule of law - "The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens." [*]

[*] Quote from Naomi Wolf

This process of creating an authoritarian state is not a new one. It hasn't been done here in the U.S. before, but we are further down the process than we have ever been before.

The really scary part if that people just don't want to hear or to believe this is possible.

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And don't bug me about the difference between an authoritarian government and "Fascism," the term used by the headline writer in the Guardian. There is no distinction that matters. None at all.

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Addendum 8:37PM
Consider the above post with the summary of techniques listed above with those Bill Moyers illuminated last night in his PBS show last night and which are summarized at FireDogLake. A lot of overlap there. Why did Bush and the NeoCons really want to attack Iraq?

Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report

Glenn Greewald does a really good job of telling us what we saw when we watched last night's Bill Moyers PBS special "Buying the War." I'll admit that I have been sitting here thinking "Yeah, I knew it was bad, but this bad?"

Greenwald takes the next step, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't until I read what he wrote:

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it). [Editor - highlighting is mine.]

Has America become so corrupt that it now subordinates the goals of building a better nation, better people and providing an environment of Freedom has become subordinate to greater money-making and building worldwide power? What has happened to the two century experiment in democracy on the North American continent?

Instead of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people have we succumbed to the disease of Imperialist wars in support of an ever wealthier elite who gather all power to themselves? We have let them centralize control of the broadcast media and the daily and weekly print media. This gives the elite the wealth to rob the rest of us of any control of our nation.

So the wealthy American elite buy an all-volunteer military and send them on a fool's errand to occupy Iraq for the primary purpose of overawing the major oil supplying nations in the world. Control of the the flow of energy supplies allows those wealthy elite to gain greater power and wealth without spreading more than a minimum of that wealth to the mass of the people who actually create it.

Bush may have overreached himself when he has decided to ignore Congress and the American people in their desire to get out of the fighting in the Middle East. But why should he listen to the American People? He has the major media and the pundits on his side?

Is this what it means to say that our democratic institutions have become corrupted? Sure looks like it to me, when Bush can steal elections without having the media tattle on him, ignore Congress with signing statements and eliminate habeas corpus by Presidential decree.

The Romans didn't really recognize that the Republic had been destroyed and replaced by the empire until generations later. We may recognize the change here sooner, but can we then prevent it? What is happening to the two century experiment in democracy? Is it over now?

USA Today shows how the DoJ handles the media in the US attorney Purge

USA Today has published a quick, short story showing how Tasia Scolinos, the attorney generals' spokeswoman, was working to bamboozle the Senators holding hearings on the US attorney Purge. A key part of the story is:

Right now the coverage will be dominated by how qualified these folks were and their theories for their dismissals. We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit by trying to put the focus on the process in which they were told - I suspect we are going to get to the point where DOJ has to say this anyway. First, it is true. Second, we are having morale problems with our other US Attorneys who understand the decision but think that these folks were not treated well in the process. I think from an internal management perspective it needs to be said.

Democracy works best when government is transparent. But transparent government means every decision that the high government officials make is carefully scrutinized and is attacked by those who find themselves disadvantaged by that decision.

That balance of competing interests leads to better, more comprehensive decisions. But they are much harder to come up with, they are harder to implement, and they are especially difficult to explain to the public in our modern political environment where large numbers of votes swing for or against a candidate based on the face validity of an extremely short and simplistic sound byte.

The solution Cheney and Bush have adopted is to do everything in secrecy. They have to do this, because most of their philosophical positions and decisions will not stand up under public scrutiny. This is not an administration that is especially adept at making and effectively implementing difficult decisions. But the American public has gotten wise to their "Trust me!" rhetoric, and the secrecy has to go.

That means that spokespersons are going to be forced to inform the public and the Congress rather than "Muddy the Waters."

At least let's hope so. It really matters to those of us who love the American two hundred year experiment in democracy.

Is there anyone In Washington D.C. who understands democracy?

Glenn Greenwald goes after Fred Hiatt, the fool (my term, not Glenn's) who is an Op-Ed columnist on the Washington Post editorial page. Then Glenn demonstrates why Fred should be considered a fool.

My question is how bad are the anti-democratic pro-elitist attitudes that drive the inside the beltway bunch? That is both in the media and in government.

Here is an example:

if Congress once listens to the opinions of actual citizens -- those filthy bloggers and their readers, or grass-roots groups like MoveOn -- that, for Hiatt, is when democracy is imperiled.

Go sit through the (short) advertisement for a day-pass at Salon and read Glenn. As you read it and as you read the editorials out of the NY Times and the Washingtom Post, ask yourself how they respond to the needs of the masses of Americans? How do they reflect Jacksonian (and modern) democracy?

The Signing Statement

The news states that the FBI has been ignoring the minor restrictions imposed in the Patriot Act. That's not surprising. President Bush said when he signed the reuathorization of the Patriot Act last March that "he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers." [See Glenn Greenwald.]

Why should he be bound by law like the rest of us. He is King George, annointed by God to be undisputed King of the United States of America with absolute, unfettered power over all Americans and all the world.

So much for the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and nearly a thousand years of English, British and American history. George Bush, by use of signing statements, has eliminated democracy in America.