http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Why_Did_They_Flinch.htmlThe most surprising thing that’s happened in American politics these last years is something that actually didn’t happen.
And what didn’t happen is that a junta bent on dismantling American democracy and replacing it with some sort of autocracy, didn’t.
Hmmm. Very curious.
I suspect history will judge this as one of the great (non-)events of the American experience, and one of the great (non-)turning points of the last two centuries, equally significant, though far less prominent, than many actual events and actual turning points. What happened and why, is, therefore, a question of no small importance to ponder. Why did the Cheney/Rove juggernaut travel half-way down the road to American fascism, only to pull up short? Why, in short, did they flinch?
...I’ll speculate. Well, not even quite that, really. Since we really have just about zero evidence to go on, let’s simply consider the possibilities. Why did they flinch? I see several possible explanations.
The obvious first answer is that premise is wrong. I (or we) have simply misapprehended Bushism, which may be a lot of things, but is not (according to this explanation) ultimately authoritarian in nature. Perhaps, in fact, they are truly just patriots who have reacted with the best of intentions to a massive attack on American soil. And, while we might quibble with these patriots here and there (not to mention also there, and over here, and down there, and just to the right a bit there, and...), ultimately all people of good will recognize that in every society we’d want to live in there must be security and there must be liberty – we just happen to draw the balancing line in a different place than do George, Dick and Alberto. But honorable people can disagree honorably on such questions. Heck, even Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, right? Even FDR jailed Japanese-Americans, no? How bad can these guys be?....(evidence that discourages this theory)...
A second possibility is that the administration is too deeply divided internally to agree on such a drastic step as conducting a coup against themselves and seizing permanent power. Evidence is now beginning to surface that points to the degree to which such divisions indeed exist. But while Rummy doesn’t bother returning Condi’s calls, and while Andrew Card ultimately did get rid of Rumsfeld – but only after Rummy first eighty-sixed Andy – these internal struggles haven’t seemed to mean much in the end, when it comes to the actual making of hard policy choices. We would be well advised to remember here that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell found out his country was going to war against Iraq only after Saudi Prince Bandar was informed by the president. All the back-benchers in the administration can whoop and holler the day long, but – up till now, at least – it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who had the president’s ear, and who got the policy choices they wanted. All the rest was just commentary, if not white noise.
Okay, so maybe what happened then is that they lost their nerve. Maybe they were willing to beat up on hapless Arab detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and destroy legions more in the uncontrolled violence they’ve unleashed across Iraq, but they didn’t have the stomach to do what would be necessary to seal the deal and permanently hijack American democracy. Given that what probably would have been required was another disaster on the scale of 9/11, perhaps this is true. But given, also, the ample evidence suggesting that the administration at least knew about the actual 9/11, even if they didn’t plan it (see David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor for a pretty solid, dispassionate, treatment of this question), perhaps it is too much of a leap to expect that they could go that far, but no further.
A fourth possibility is that they simply didn’t think they needed to. Remember, this is a president who hired a bunch of sycophants to gather ‘round and remind him what a great dude he is, and then proceeded to believe them when, stupor mundi, they gathered ‘round and reminded him what a great dude he is. This is a guy who thought in early 2005 (and likely far later, perhaps even still) that he had “earned political capital”, which was now his to spend. As if that weren’t delusional enough, it is now being reported that the great guru Karl Rove, whose ‘genius’ has always been far overrated (more on that in a later column) wasn’t just telling the media earlier this month that he expected the GOP to hold onto Congress in the election because he had to put on his game face rally the troops. Now we’re told that Rove actually believed what he was saying, and was telling the president so. If this is true, November 7th must have felt rather more like August 6th inside a certain oval-shaped office. Or perhaps August 6th, 1066!
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