Bush Dictatorship Nearing an End?

There's not much new news this morning, but a number of articles hit the press today that seem to me to fit together somehow. First, the New York Times has a piece today on how the President and his men want to have the power to arrest at will anyone they deem an enemy combatant. No judicial review. No trial. Hold them forever. Of course, we've known this for quite some time. Jose Padilla wasn't arrested yesterday after all. Still, it's nice to see someone actually saying it up front and above the fold. Yes, the President wants to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all in one. As one of Nixon's Justice Department officials argued before the Supreme Court, the president in his exercise of his role as Commander-in-Chief has exactly the same powers as King Louis XIV, who said, “La loi, c'est moi.”

And, we thought we lived in a democracy, governed by the rule of law to which every man, including the president, was subservient. Think again.

Second, also in the New York Times, behind the subscription wall, Frank Rich as usual writes a great piece on the White House lies and the lying liars who continue to tell them. Here are some of the highlights:

...each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe...

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

..."We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Remember, one of the arguments the Bushies advance for why they have the right to arrest and detain Americans and others without trial or judicial review is that they are our elected leaders, and we should TRUST them. What better evidence could we have of their trustworthiness (not) than the evidence of the lies they told in the lead up to the war and the lies they are now telling to cover up their deception? Frankly, I don't trust ANY government to have these kinds of powers, but especially not THIS government!

Finally, this morning, there's the news that the British Parliament may begin a full scale investigation of the lies told by the Blair Administration in the lead up to the war. That may be the closest we will get to an investigation of Bush, and I doubt it can fail to find culpability here. Will the U.S. press pick up on it? Who knows. But, if it does, that may be the final blow to this dictatorship. We can only hope.