I owe you an apology.  I said some pretty mean things in the heat of your Presidency, and now that I’ve had some time to cool off, I want to tell you that I’m sorry and how much I’ve changed.  I said some pretty awful things: I called you “the worst President ever,” a “war criminal,” and linked your Presidency to the end of democracy.  But I now know, it wasn’t you, it was me.

I didn’t realize that starting wars in the Arab world didn’t even need Congressional authorization!  You went above and beyond the call of law by getting authorization to use military force to spread democracy and liberate people from their evil dictators who we used to prop up.

You used signing statements to let Congress know which of its laws you planned to ignore.  Sure President Clinton used them first, but only a few times.  But now that President Obama has used them dozens of times, to specifically set aside any Congressional oversight, I realize that it is the prerogative of the Commander in Chief to decide what laws should be enforced and which laws should be ignored.  At the time I laughed at you for proclaiming yourself “the decider,” but now I realize you were just being honest.

Your illegal wiretapping scheme really made me mad.  Imagine the thought of the government being able to listen in on my phone calls, emails, text messages, any communication you want, just say it’s in connection with a “terrorism” investigation and it’s yours.  Of course I thought that seemed wrong at the time, and so did Senator Obama during the brief period of time he was campaigning to people like me, riled up and angry partisans.  But now that he is President he is keeping and extending all of your eavesdropping programs, and blocking any meaningful attempts at oversight.

You used Guantanamo Bay to imprison people you kidnapped from foreign countries and hold them outside of any established legal framework.  You invented an extra-judicial legal system to hold show trials so that the American values that we are supposedly at war to protect could never be applied to a new class of persons you called “enemy combatants.”  But after vowing to change all of that in a heated campaign, President Obama has reversed himself and is continuing to keep the prison open. He’s even going farther than you are and re-writing our laws to enable “indefinite detention” and do things that our founding fathers specifically designed our constitution to prevent.

Then there was the torture. You spent a great deal of energy at a high level of government deciding how much simulated drowning was too much, which positions hurt the most, and how much sleep deprivation would break someone but all the while being (mostly) careful not to kill anyone.  But President Obama has continued your policies, even applying them to PFC Bradley Manning, a US Citizen just like me, whose conditions of imprisonment are so objectionable that Amnesty International, The UN, and hundreds of leading American law professors have tried to get his torture to stop.  When Hillary Clinton’s spokesman was caught on the record objecting to Manning’s treatment, he was summarily fired, which means that Obama and Clinton seem to think the torture regime you came up with was a pretty good idea, President Bush.  I don’t know why I got so upset before.

One of the reasons your Presidency seemed so upsetting was because all of the thing you were doing were shrouded in Secrecy.  Even when you were sued by the ACLU you claimed broad privileges not to provide certain evidence, citing “state secrets.”  But President Obama obviously thinks you had good reason to do so, because he has expanded his use of state secrets privilege, not only using it to hide evidence but as grounds to dismiss entire cases because the people cannot know about what is being done in our name.

What little the public knew about the things you were doing came from leaks in your administration.  Although you made a lot of noise about prosecuting leakers, you never went as far as President Obama in actively prosecuting leak cases and making clear that the wrongdoing that is exposed by whistleblowers pales in comparison to the crime of speaking to the press.  Sorry again.

Of course there were also the tax cuts.  I thought you were so awful when you took the $237 billion dollar surplus we had in 2000 and got rid of it in one fell swoop by giving it away to the already-rich.  What a conniving, awful, and very Republican thing to do!  Until of course, President Obama made it a priority to use the final hours of a Democratic Congress to extend your tax cuts to the very wealthiest.  I know the country is broke fighting all of those wars, but obviously you were on the right track by making sure the wealthy keep their money so that it could trickle down to the rest of the population.  Very smart policy!  I now realize I was so wrong to object to your bi-partisan wisdom.

You made a lot of noise about the Social Security crisis — apparently it’s going to run out of money somewhere around 2040.  But even though you claimed a mandate to hand over my retirement to the salivating Wall Street bankers, you were never able to touch it.  I hated you for wanting to dismantle one of the crowning achievements of our liberal democracy.  But now that President Obama is soberly devoted to doing the same thing, I realize you were just a visionary, trying to do the right thing years ahead of your time.

In fact, I don’t really remember why I thought you were so awful at all, Mr. President.  It seems that with very few exceptions, President Obama has continued with all of your policies and priorities.  He does have a way of making me feel like he’s really smart and knows more than I do about stuff in a way that you, Mr. Bush, always made me wonder if you really knew what you were doing.  But it turns out you did!  You knew exactly what you were doing, because it was the same as this smart man who we all love, who really has his hands tied.  You must have had a hard time, President Bush — no wonder you were always so annoyed by reporters who asked you questions.

I don’t mean to insult you by saying that there’s no difference between you and President Obama.  I’m sure you know there are some very important differences.  And the blind partisan supporters of both of you will magnify the differences and will be very angry at the comparison, because to acknowledge the truth would make everything they worked for and believed in seem meaningless.  But the reasons that I hated you above all others from your party, the reasons that I thought you were singularly awful, those have been rendered meaningless and silly in the two short years since you’ve been gone.  In those most important ways, you’re no different than your successor, and we just don’t seem able to get all that worked up about it when he does it.

So please accept my sincerest apologies. I hope you’re having a great time in Dallas, or wherever you moved to after the photo ops at your “ranch” in Crawford were no longer needed.  Say hi to Laura, she always seemed to get the short end of the stick. (Is she considering a run for Senate now?)  And if you’re up for having a beer sometime, let me know.

Yours in citizenship,

Jon Marcus

As Naomi Klein has brilliantly distilled in her landmark book The Shock Doctrine, the only consistent ideology of this administration and its Democratic enablers is the use of the shock produced by a crisis to force deeply unpopular economic changes in favor of powerful corporations upon a quietly compliant and frightened population.  Written and passed within a week of the crisis, the bailout bill beats the six-week-turnaround of the hastily-passed and barely-read USA PATRIOT Act, another sweeping assertion of executive power rushed through in a crisis without discussion, analysis or (god forbid) debate.  A very telling New York Times report entitled “Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings” noted that Administration officials laid the groundwork for this by presenting the threat to (or scaring the crap out of) key members of Congress.  Glenn Greenwald notes the parallels between this process and the invasion of Iraq, in which respected members of Executive branch agencies, solely charged with the sober assessment of fact, have tailored information to fit their ultimate agenda in order to scare lawmakers into “bi-partisan” compliance.
Like Dick Cheney, who was the CEO of Halliburton before he came into the Administration and led us into a war that happened to be the best thing that ever happened to his company, so too will former Goldman Sachs CEO-turned-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson oversee an intervention in the economy that his company will see great profit from.  Like every other significant event of the past eight years, Bush is benched during the crisis, while all around him, in every department of the executive branch, titans of industry use the federal government to loot the treasury and re-write the law to immunize themselves.

The Democrats are so complicit in these economic problems they find themselves in a very difficult predicament so close to an election.  Among the largest beneficiaries of Wall Street money in the House and Senate are Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd, chairmen of their respective Banking Committees.  And Barack Obama’s support from that sector is greater than McCain’s.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid continue their Kabuki Theater of Objections to the Bush plan, while using their total control of the Congressional agenda to pass whatever Bush asks of them.  This has left an odd opening for John McCain to grab the populist side of this issue.  Although he changes positions more often than his toothbrush, he knows that if he frames a message simply and powerfully enough it doesn’t matter that he’s lying.  “I’m Against this bailout” — and whether he votes for it or not (and he’ll probably skip it) that’s the message that gets across to the American workers who don’t understand economics any better or worse than McCain does, but know the bailout doesn’t pass the smell test.

What is in this bill?  We will be finding out for months and years to come what it means.  Will it bankrupt our treasury and force further cuts to social services, health and safety regulatory agencies, or prevent funding of a national health care program?  Isn’t it shocking and unprecedented that a party of the far-right would nationalize private corporations?  What sort of movement fueled by deeply nationalistic and religious fervor responds to an economic crisis by giving itself broad new powers and erasing the lines between government and corporate interests?  I believe it’s called National Socialism.  Ever heard of it?

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ASK YOURSELF: Do you believe that the people of a nation are accountable for the atrocities committed by their leaders in their names

IF YES: Are you okay with the fact that the United States tortures so-called enemy combatants? Are you okay with the fact that our constitution, which gives this country its sense of moral authority, only applies to US Citizens, itself a designation subject to revocation by our government

IF NO: Are you okay with the fact that an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed because the US didn’t like their government? Are you okay with the fact that thousands of Afghani civilians (no organization has been able to accurately count) have been killed as a result of the armed conflict against The Taliban

ASK YOURSELF: Have you expressed your opinion to your government? If you haven’t contacted your Congressman or Senator because you don’t think they care, you should know that they haven’t done anything about it because they don’t think you care

Who Represents Me? – Congress.org

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I have allowed HOPE to overtake cynicism during this election, and to continue to honor that possibility, I ask the following of myself and those who believe we can make real change:

• I will not feel powerless over the problems of our time that seem too big to change
• I will not dismiss people because I disagree with them on one issue but instead I will try to find our common ground
• I will not exaggerate or overstate my claims
• I will not watch the angry blowhards on TV, even to just see what they’re saying
• I will simply not discuss the dirt and scandal being peddled about the personal lives of politicians, not even to decry it
• I will not give voice to my deepest fears and cynical beliefs but for once keep them to myself
• I will not make crystal-ball predictions, but rather I will focus on saying what I want to see happen
• I will not write off whole segments of the population as hopeless or stupid or irredeemable
• I will not read polls to figure out what my fellow Americans are thinking, I will engage in meaningful conversations with the people around me, and I will really listen to what they are saying
• I will not attack anyone personally for saying something I disagree with; I will focus on debating their ideas
• I will change the conversation around me, I will question conventional assumptions, and I won’t be afraid to say something unpopular
• I will participate in our democracy by keeping myself informed; I will seek out information from new sources in order to challenge myself
• I will not trust elected officials to do the right thing: I will help them do the right thing
• I will work to understand the part I play in a giant system of consumption and waste, and I will neither over-estimate nor underestimate my individual importance within it

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On Sunday, Rep. Reyes announced a near-complete about-face on the issue, describing himself as having an “open mind” on granting immunity to the telecoms while The Washington Post reports that a deal is in the works to pass the Senate bill. House Democratic leadership, bowing to pressure from Republicans and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, is expected to break the Senate version of the bill into two parts to separate the spying authorization and telecom immunity, allowing liberal Democrats to vote against the immunity provision while still assuring its passage.

Glenn Greenwald of salon.com, one of the most astute and dedicated journalists covering this issue, writes today that the House Democrats are being “stupid and self-destructive” and accuses them of having no political principles.

I have often privately called the behavior of both the Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats “stupid.” But behind all of the supposed incompetence of the Administration has been a program of sweeping privatization and a highly effective policy transformation that has worked entirely in its favor. And behind the failure of Democrats to act in the interests of their constituents or their supposed core values is a powerful alignment of power, money, and campaign tactics to preserve their own incumbency. In short, I do not believe that any of these behaviors reflect a lack of intelligence or thoughtful strategy.

So that leaves me asking, what are the possible reasons for House Democrats to suddenly change their minds and go from defending the constitution, checks and balances and rule of law to being “open-minded” and preparing to use their power to allow passage a bill that protects lawbreakers from any accountability?

When people suddenly change their long-held principled opinions, there is generally a good reason which is far from stupidity. It means that something else has become more important than this particular opinion, like money, health, personal safety, or a horse-trade for another opinion of greater importance. Obviously, enormous pressure has been brought to bear on the Democratic leadership. What did they trade for this change? Have threats been made against them, either to their personal safety or to their reputations with the contents of their most personal communication? Are they getting generous financial contributions to maintain their hold on power?

Asking these questions is an invitation to be called a conspiracy theorist, but I am just asking questions that are logical extensions of the contradictions that have come out of this situation.

Does anyone else have any idea why the Democrats might suddenly have changed their minds?