Dumbing Democracy Down

I have had in mind for some time a post on the subject of how little correlation there is between the abstract idealized concept of "democracy" and the on-the-ground manifestations at home and abroad. I would almost have sworn I had so posted not long ago, but cursory skim of archives suggests not.

As you might imagine, recent events in Pakistan have definitely acted to galvanize this concept that has been festering with me for several months.

One of the primary contributing allergens here was the desperate flailing by george-the-even-lesser after his first several pretexts for attacking and occupying Iraq came up empty. This sanctimonious business about spreading democracy and freedom only arose when the venality of his first desperate attempts to justify his criminality was exposed. But this "spreading" rationale is obvious hooey also; we have treated Iraq like a foix gras goose, force-feeding what we need down the national gullet with sufficient vehemence to overcome the gag reflex. Of course, given how devoid of actual imagination and creativity these thugs are, the result necessarily bears a strong resemblance to a noir-ish takeoff on something that Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair would have a field day with - or would if the killing and violence could be contained.

So there's that side of the equation, and comparably dark descriptions could doubtless be developed for the outcome of our efforts in Afghanistan.

And then there is the other realm of the quality of government and human rights in those countries we cozy up to and call our bosom-buddies (although I don't recall seeing any bush neck-rubs for the like of Bandar-Bush, Musharraf, et al). How do you suppose an actual unbiased auditor might rate the state of democracy and human rights in, say Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, or Pakistan, just to pick a few examples?

I'm guessing those grades would be pretty low.

Which brings me around to the second part of the equation. The destruction of human rights and abuse of the Constitution here in these united states in the last seven years is from what I can tell wholly unprecedented. There have certainly been abuses in the past (Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War comes to mind), and presidents (Hoover, e.g.) with a disdain for actual individual people and their critical central priority, at least as the founders seem to have had it.

Obeisance to corporations, and the elevation of the corporation to a status of greater importance than an actual person, is a long-standing issue that already had the country out-of-kilter since well before Clinton. But Reagan, Ford, Clinton, and now Bush have definitely been devilish when it comes to abandoning the needs and rights of actual people, all of them to varying degrees succubuses to Big Business, selling out human rights at home and abroad as they pocketed huge wads of cash.

But we are experiencing a new thing here. Bush has of course pursued this destruction of the principle that actual live People have priority over the East India Company/ENRON/megacorporation X/Boeing/Microsoft/military-industrial-complex that our nation's founders fought so hard for to a nadir unimaginable a decade or so ago. The multitude of ways in which our rights as Persons are in the process of being suborned, and the basic principles of what we came to take for granted as our rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights is absolutely appalling.

Which, in a round-about way, brings me to my original Ironic-thesis.

George the never-accountable, persistent semi-psychopathic schoolground-bully, and AWOL stealer of expensive flight-training may indeed find a way in his ever-so-twisted narcoleptic, addictive, narcissistic saurian brain-stem to rationalize that he is indeed "spreading democracy." How so? Well it's a lot like the "torture" thing. It's all in the words, you know. Change the definition and you change the zeitgeist. We as a country now seem to be semi-complacent with a rampantly corrupt election system, torture as a matter of national policy, and spying and surveillance of the citizenry in violation of the laws passed in response to far more limited Nixonian transgressions. We have barely managed to come around to regretting the consequences of a wholly-uncalled-for aggressive invasion and occupation of a non-threatening nation with a human cost of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, apparently solely in the interests of braggadocio and a chance to swagger in a codpiece, one-up dad, and control oil resources.

Given a few more months of erosion of democracy here at home at the current rate, it won't be a huge stretch to find some fuzzy equivalency between the degree of "democracy" in any number of nations that are (appropriately) flashing red for human rights organizations (e.g., because they are receiving our renditions and doing the torture for us so John McCain can still run for office) with life here in the good old usa.

Frank Rich has some similarly dark ruminations, and I tip my hat to him for inspiring me to get something like the post I though I had already done together:

As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

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But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

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I Give You the Marquis GHB de Sade

There was at least one major point woefully missed (okay, purposely covered up) by the corporate media in the pathetic softball questioning of Mukasey, proven by his own testimony to be a certifiable torture-supporter and checks-and-balances-(as in the Constitution)-foe. There's no "debate" about whether waterboarding is torture or whether torture is illegal in the USA. The answers are Yes!, and YES, DAMN IT!! So, ever so typically, the corporate media have in lockstep presented this as a matter subject to wide-open question, sort of like the color choices for a makeover of the west wing. A pox on you, media. And for that matter, shame on you, Congress.


I offer up this image in a first speculation on the eventual outcome of our corrupt and failed government's attempts to hide the bush ineptitude and the cheney criminality.

Of course government doesn't work for the people when all you do is hire idiots and sycophants. Sadly we have worse than that here now.

This is the trailer of a Digby post. Please check out the first part here.

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I was on the Seder show earlier today and mentioned that broadcast (mangling the date Commander Swift mentioned, unfortunately.) It was in response to Sam's question as to whether the US has truly gone over the cliff. I said it was a near thing, mostly because of people like our friend Professor Rivkin there.

This man claims that if an American trainee can endure something, it can't legally be called torture. He shamefully goes even further to state that if we call it torture, it means that all of those who have trained our troops to withstand it are guilty of being torturers.
He neglects, of course, to admit that the recruits and trainees who are put though such exercises can quit at any time and they know very well that their instructors won't actually kill them. The total lack of control in the hands of someone who believes you are an enemy is what makes waterboarding torture, and people who do it voluntarily have control. That's the difference, and it's clear to anyone who isn't an intellectual fraud as Rivkin is.

He and others (like Pat Buchanan) are now saying that we need to make waterboarding explicitly illegal if we have a problem with it --- even though one would think that any torture that was used by the Spanish inquisition and Pol Pot would automatically come under the heading of "torture" which is illegal under at least five different statutes and treaties. They are trying to pretend that waterboarding isn't already illegal, pretending that waterboarding is merely "controversial" so they are pushing for a "debate."(Swift even admits that they've left us no choice between the weasel words, parsing and secrecy.)

There is good reason to surmise that one of the main reasons why they are pushing for this legislation is so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can't be indicted for war crimes retroactively. (Kind of like their friends the Telcoms.) After all, that's the real reason Mukasey was instructed to say that he didn't know if waterboarding was illegal. If he had, he might have been required to arrest some very important people who we know approved it.

But Rivkin's bobbing and weaving serves another purpose. He's literally defining deviancy down. He submits that these "stress positions" and the "hot and cold" and the waterboarding and other things they've done (plus God only knows what we aren't yet aware of) are necessary when you are dealing with "bad guys" who always lie. And anyway, if Army rangers can endure it in training then so can suspected terrorists (who've been blindfolded, stripped, sodomized repeatedly with "suppositories", held in painful restraints for days, subjected to extreme cold while being splashed with water and denied sleep.) This is what the right wing has left of their principles: if our special forces guys can live through something during their training that means it's ok for us to do it to others under much more terrifying circumstances.

There has been tragic a shift in our culture's taboos, thanks to schmucks like Alan Dershowitz and others who put this on the menu in the days after 9/11 and normalized the idea that torture might be ok --- as long as we're the torturers. There are plenty of people who agree with that reflexively. After all, our president told them right after 9/11 that we are good:

[H]ow do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we've go to do a better job of making our case.

So, if we are good (exceptionally good!) that means that whatever we do is good. But torture is bad. So, that means that no matter what we do it can't, by definition, be torture. See how that works? (I wonder if he also thinks this is a useful way to "make our case" to the rest of the world that we are good.)

This is more right wing rabbit-hole logic, and it's become a sick parody of itself now that they are openly using it to defend torture techniques from the Spanish Inquisition. You ask this man Rivkin if he would consider waterboarding torture if it were done to him and he said unequivocally, no. (He learned his lesson well. The last Republican lawyer who went out and had himself waterboarded was fired when he called it torture.) It's actually just another tool that good people use to defeat "bad guys." No biggie. It's not even illegal.