should calamity strike. Free balloons!
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/Even more heartwarming, "catastrophe," in the vague, nearly useless language of these documents, could mean, why, just about anything at all. Hurricane? Flood? Low polling numbers for Giuliani? A bad tattoo of Alberto Gonzales' smirky face on Jenna Bush's sacrum? You bet! Because who gets to decide what constitutes a "catastrophe"? Why, Shrub himself, that's who. What's more, the event doesn't even have to occur in America (see "regardless of location"). Such a perceived "disruption" can happen anywhere in the world and with a press of the shiny red button next to his bed, Bush kicks the Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) into gear. Neat!
I know what you're thinking. And I completely agree: Such secret plans are one of the most adorable, comic-booky aspects of dumb, ultrasecretive administrations. After all, do many 'Merkins not love to swoon and polish their NRA memberships as they imagine all those White House suits suddenly turning into patriotic superheroes at the first sign of a meteor strike or an attack by an alien super race or maybe just if Iraq gets a bit too uppity and starts bootlegging illegal DVDs of "The Office"? You bet they do.
And then boom, the nation goes into lockdown and it's a strict military state and Lynn Cheney starts enjoying sweaty night visions of Dick lumbering purposefully through the White House halls deciding who to nuke next as Dubya quivers in the corner and the flying monkeys prepare the escape pod. Just like in that Will Smith movie! Neat!
Let us now be serious for a moment. Let us hold back the sarcasm and step back and breathe a sigh of relief because I'm sure Dubya's changes to NSPD 51 mean a whole lotta nothing. I'm sure it's just another standard -- albeit a bit weird -- governmental procedural, boring and forgettable and just one of thousands of such indecipherable, hazily unconstitutional legal quirkballs in the Pentagon's creaky file cabinets, and Dubya's recent changes are just an honest tweak to what really amounts to a rather ridiculous, fantastical document in the first place. Yes, surely it's just a bunch of silly leftist paranoia to think that something dark and nasty could result from such a move.
After all, Shrub only has a year and a half left in office. Plus, his power has been severely truncated by the Dems. Why would he care to try for such a thuggish, cagey power grab now? What would be the point? Except, you know, to savagely tilt the next election and to further the new 'n' brutal neocon agenda of perpetual war and as a desperate, last-gasp move to prove he actually has the cojones to do something so appalling, so perfectly megalomaniacal, it's sure to rescue his rotten legacy from history's compost pile? I mean, besides that.
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