The Constitution in Peril

[cal04]

The War on Terror didn't start as an attack on Americans' rights, but several new books argue that's exactly what happened.

A slew of recent books about the Bush administration's wars (at home as well as abroad) might leave you wondering if President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are their own Axis of Evil. In excruciating detail, these tomes tell of torture and warrantless wiretaps; they show a relentless arrogation of power and abrogation of what were thought to be solid constitutional principles. In these books, apocalyptic delusions got us into Iraq and misjudgments have helped keep us there. The picture that emerges is so bleak that even serious journalists and scholars sometimes veer toward conspiracy theories.

Consider, for instance, the lurid title of an otherwise scrupulously researched book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage: "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy."

(snip)
The Bush and Cheney who emerge from these pages cherish secrecy, they deplore constraint and they sneer at dissent, so nothing and nobody can dissuade them from their chosen course. Reality checks are not allowed. "Democracies die behind closed doors," federal appeals court Judge Damon Keith said in 2002. "The Framers of the First Amendment did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us. They protected the people against secret government."


Jack Goldsmith, who served briefly in 2003 and 2004 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel—a key position because it determines for the government what is legal and what's not—suggests that the "strange and unattractive views on presidential power" held by Bush and Cheney will create a backlash compromising future presidents. That may be, but for now, in many respects, the Bush-Cheney vision has triumphed. Savage concludes that Cheney and Bush will leave presidential powers enhanced at the expense of Congress and the courts, to the detriment of the checks and balances essential to our constitutional system. (Savage suggests there's already some nervousness among Republicans fearful that Hillary Clinton will reap the benefits. No president will want to see his or her imperial authority eroded.) "The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history—not controversies, but facts," says Savage. The worldwide war with terrorists that is so important to the arguments for that presidential power, including the occupation of Iraq, will go on as well. Last week all the leading Democratic presidential candidates admitted as much. What might have seemed farfetched political and military fantasies seven years ago are inescapable realities today.

more
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21047601/site/newsweek/page/0/

A Censored Constitution?: New books on how Americans began to lose their rights

[gateley]

1. What Constitution? nt

[grasswire]

2. catapulting the propaganda

"Goldsmith, a conservative academic and generally a supporter of a strong executive, argues in his book "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration"....."

So he writes a book saying this is how it is from now on; it is futile to resist the terror presidency.

I call it propaganda.