Scoundrel Day
September 11th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
President George W. Bush has declared September 11, “Patriot Day” and asked governors to fly their flags at half-staff. Texas Governor Rick Perry has complied and put out a statement that reads in part:
“September 11th will forever be regarded as a day that changed America,” said Perry. “We were reminded that the evil in the hearts of men can manifest itself in harm to those people and institutions we most deeply cherish, even in places we long regarded as safe.”
When I look at those flags, I feel incredible sadness, not just for the innocents who died in 2001 or the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have perished needlessly from the folly of a war of choice. I feel incredible sadness for our country — that we let this collection of scoundrels in the Bush-Cheney administration use the cover of patriotism to piss all over the Constitution and sully the rights that once separated us from so many other nations.
The most explosive quotation to come out of this administration that I’ve read can be found in the extraordinary new book The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack L. Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. (An excerpt from the book can be found here.)
The quote comes from David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Addington has bullied his way through the executive branch on a mission for his master to create a unitary executive, a modern-day American dictatorship. In order to do so, the administration has had to wipe away decades of precedent including judicial review of government wiretapping by a special court, first established in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Goldsmith reports Addington saying, “We are one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court.”
Here you have one of the most powerful officials in the government today wishing for a terrorist attack so the executive will have license to impose its will. This is beyond unconscionable, it’s truly shocking, even from a crew that I thought could no longer surprise. These people are not just incompetent and foolhardy, they are a threat to America.
And as long as they maintain power, Patriot Day must share equal billing with Scoundrel Day.
