Moyer interviews Bacevich on the American security complex and its' failed Iraq war

Tonight at 9:00 pm Bill Moyers will air an interview with Col. Bacevich about the nature of the Imperial Presidency, the nature of the security state which has grown up since WW II, Congress' abdication of control and its new job as a perpetual job machine for Congress persons, and the way our security state has failed to stop 9/11 and failed to properly plan and organize the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Here is a short excerpt from that hour-long interview:



If this doesn't leave you thinking, then give it up. You have nothing to think with.


[H/T to Talking Points Memo.]

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Addendum 8/16/2008 1:11 pm CDT
Here is a link to the full transcript of the show "The Imperial Presidency" which aired last night.

Here is a video of the entire show shown last night.

This is Bacevich's newest book "The Limits of Power" which is scheduled for release next Tuesday, August 19, 2008.

This is Barnes & Noble's synopsis of the book:

The Limits of Power identifies a profound triple crisis facing America:

• the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad;
• the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only;
• U.S. involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic.

These pressing problems threaten all of us, Republicans and Democrats. If the nation is to solve its predicament, it will need the revival of a distinctly American approach: the neglected tradition of realism.

Andrew J. Bacevich, uniquely respected across the political spectrum, offers a historical perspective on the illusions that have governed American policy since 1945. The realism he proposes includes respect for power and its limits; sensitivity to unintended consequences; aversion to claims of exceptionalism; skepticism of easy solutions, especially those involving force; and a conviction that the books will have to balance. Only a return to such principles, Bacevich argues, can provide common ground for fixing America’s urgent problems before the damage becomes irreparable.
[I have added the emphasis and the bullet points. Editor WTF-o]

President or Tyrant? Bush is the latter.

Also from Juan Cole:

Bush signed a law forbidding him from spending money to make permanent bases in Iraq but at the same time issued a signing statement making clear he had no intention of paying any attention to that or several other provisions in the legislation. What do you call a leader unconstrained by his legislature? An absolute monarch. I thought we had a revolution to get rid of that sort of thing.

George Bush is an un-American tyrant, and our political leaders are either cheering him on or refusing to act as the Constitution directs by impeaching him.

How is the tyrant George Bush any better than a Communist dictator of the kind America fought a four-decade Cold War to avoid? McCain or Romney will be merely a continuation of the same anti-democratic tyrannical government.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote this morning of the new Attorney General:

Mukasey is the federal judge who, when presiding over the Padilla case in 2002, endorsed the most tyrannical and un-American power there is, when he ruled that the President even has the power to imprison U.S. citizens indefinitely, even when detained on U.S. soil, with no process of any kind -- a position he refused to repudiate during his confirmation hearing.

So the new American norm is that the President is above the law, eliminating the Rule of Law. The lack of the Rule of Law guts the Constitution by making it unenforceable. Mukasey's ruling also paves the way to the creation of legal gulags which are recognized under the court approved law.

When these anti-American tyrants come for you, don't say you weren't warned. All you can truthfully say is that you ignored the warnings.

Congress can trim Bush's wings without impeachment

Mark Kleiman makes a good case that impeaching Bush and Cheney is an impossibility - and is not particularly useful anyway. As Mark says, just because Broder opposes an idea does not necessarily make it a good one. So he suggests an interesting Plan B.

Congressional Democrats create a crisis around the executive privilege/contempt citation issue by issuing a subpoena to Libby (with a grant of immunity), voting a contempt citatation when he doesn't show up on Bush's orders, making a referral to the U.S. Attorney that Bush blocks, and then voting a Congressional arrest warrant.

If Bush moves to block Libby's arrest, I doubt the courts would back him; the precedents for Congressional arrest are old (none since 1934) but still valid. It's hard for Bush to claim that Libby's arrest would impinge on Presidential power, since Libby doesn't work for him anymore.

So either Libby turns himself in and either testifies or sits in the DC jail, or he stays out, a fugitive from justice. Since LIbby doesn't have Secret Service protection, the arrest warrant could be served without an armed confrontation. Either way, he's not a sympathetic character.

In the meantime, one of the two Appropriations Committees zeroes out Cheneys White House office (leaving him his Senate office) and takes 95% cuts in the White House press office, political affairs office, personnel office, and whatever unit holds the agency liaisons, and forbidding details to any of the units getting a cut. That actually works, meaning that Bush and Cheney have much less actual capacity to do harm. Constitutionally, no one doubts Congress has the power to refuse to appropriate money. Substantively, the cuts are fully justified by the fact that the units being cut are units over which Bush says Congress can't exercise oversight, because of his claims of executive privilege.

This would seem to make Bush's recent claim that the Department of Justice not be allowed to prosecute individuals who are in contempt of Congress for ignoring the subpoena if the President claims Executive Privilege.

Compare the Bush view of Congress to that of the Kaiser

Interesting - the Bush/Cheney view of the relationship between the President and the Congress is very close to the actual relationship between German Emperors Kaiser Wilhelm I and Kaiser Wilhelm II to the German Reichstag of that period. At least Mark Kleimsn thinks that is a good comparison.

Mark makes a good case. If this is what American conservatism has come to, and it looks like it with Bush attempting to assert the Judge-made law of "Executive Privilege to block any effort by Congress to subpoena individuals appointed to office by the President, then conservatism has followed the path of the lemmings and gone over a big cliff.

I thought that the term "Imperial Presidency" was just rhetoric to expose a severe overreaching by the administration. Who knew that it was the actual blue print for their behavior?

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Addendum 1:50 PM CDT
Mark Kleiman explains how to stop the Bush administration from making this current overreach work here.

The imperial presidency - deja-vu all over again

Want to see what the Constitutional crisis that is building between the President and Congress? Digby presents the history from Nixon by way of Cheney to the Bush White House. We will see this working out in the next year or so, and since it is a matter of principle to Dick Cheney, it is extremely likely to lead to impeachment of Bush and Cheney both.