|
|
|
|
President Disastro
 Our
government has to protect us, and how it does
so is none of our business.
But now we luckily learn how the
huge but shadowy National Security Agency does it, thanks
to USA
Today, which has done a bit of  countersnooping
in our behalf. Without informing us, and
with the cooperation of three telecommunications giants, the NSA has
secretly collected records of billions of our phone calls. And it’s still
building its database.
Nobody’s rights have been
violated, President Disastro assures us, acknowledging that yes, he
authorized the secret program. For our own good, of course. Don’t
worry, it’s all compatible with the laws, the Constitution, the Bill of
Rights, the UN Charter, and all that stuff. Just the way Thomas Jefferson
would have wanted it.
I rarely chat with terrorists, and
I’m not particularly afraid of being singled out for the Bush
administration’s special attention, but it’s the principle of the
thing. Once again this gang has been caught red-handed being underhanded.
This is how we live now.
Self-government doesn’t mean we have to know everything our rulers
are up to, does it? It’s hard enough keeping track of agencies like the
Department of Agriculture. There are so many of them, protecting us from
so many things. And the rules, which are countless, are always on their side.
This is the greatest, freest
country on earth? Well, in some ways maybe, no thanks to Bush and his
team. If some of our legal traditions still survive, albeit severely curtailed,
it’s in spite of these madmen, not because of them. The present
system — a huge, hideous, monstrous distortion of the government
originally prescribed in that Constitution — suits them just fine.
![[Breaker quote for President Disastro: Worse than we thought, as usual]](2006breakers/060511.gif) Clever
idea, the Constitution. Too bad it didn’t
work. By now we should stop congratulating ourselves on it. The Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Amendments pretty well destroyed what was left of it, and
with all due credit to Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the ovine
electorate allowed Franklin Roosevelt and his successors to finish the job.
The incumbent is just adding a few
twists of his own. Lincoln set precedents for executive arrogance by
suspending habeas corpus, free speech, and press, arresting elected
officials, and invading the states. Wilson and Roosevelt followed suit with
other wartime persecutions and usurpations. Since all three enjoy the
ultimate benison of liberalism — these were “great”
presidents — it seems churlish of liberals to spurn Bush, the
“conservative” they’ve brought on themselves.
To their credit, liberals have
become more skeptical than conservatives about “national
security” as a pretext for overweening executive power. They prefer
other rationales for violations of our liberty — “social
justice,” and so forth.
But in the end, both sides get
along very well, accepting each other’s gains and seldom threatening
to repeal any power that has been established. The iron law they both
respect is that the state must grow. Its powers can’t be repealed, it
can’t be cut back to its previous scale, its ambitions can’t be
reduced. “You can’t turn back the clock,” as they say.
Now, at last, a president may be
bringing the system to a final crisis with more promises and debts than it
can sustain. He has no sense of limits or proportion, or of what his subjects
will tolerate. For all their excesses, the “great” presidents knew
there were some lines they mustn’t cross. They lied with finesse.
Some of their lies are still believed, chiseled on the marble monuments we
call “our heritage.”
But Bush lies without finesse. One
of his chief weaknesses is that he is fatally gauche. Even simple people
realize that he has deceived them and that he’s now just insulting
their intelligence. Conservative intellectuals have argued that his
embarrassing awkwardness is a mark of his “authenticity,”
when it’s really a sign of his insincerity. He repeats himself like a
dumb criminal repeating a formulaic alibi he’s afraid to risk putting
into fresh words, lest an inconsistency betray him.
Having used up all his chances with
more than two years to go as president, Bush now faces historical infamy.
The rest of us face the continued horror and humiliation of being ruled by
him, and it isn’t likely to get any better before January 2009. But
even if a calamitous collapse can be delayed until then, there may be no way
his successor can avoid it.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |