remember when I used to call the neo cons the bushmilhousegang?

[donsu]

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8e620390-5c8b-41bf-a76f-440124755bed


George Milhous Bush
In which our current president tries to finish what Richard Nixon started.


Last week the Bush administration reached its Nixonian climax, as CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed that the government had nearly drowned some people on purpose using techniques that American military men have long known as torture. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the Department of Justice could not investigate these alleged crimes. White House spokesman Tony Fratto explained why the President may authorize them again. Vice President Dick Cheney declared them a good thing. The administration is saying in effect, We do as we please, and care nothing for the laws; now, show us, Congress and loyal subject, er, citizens, what are you going to do about it? And Americans, frankly, face a strong temptation not to do anything: We will have a new president soon, and the race is exciting. But hard choice though it is, we need to recognize the constitutional crisis to which this administration has brought us, and as its officers now openly refuse to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, Congress must do all it can to expose, with the patience of the prosecutor the administration will not appoint, the wrongs done in our name. Otherwise we will forfeit what we painfully won from the Nixon era: our right to a government bound by law.

The Bush administration has been following a Nixonian script since its opening act. Like Richard Nixon, the President entered office declaring himself a new kind of Republican, a compassionate uniter of feuding factions, then immediately began to stigmatize dissent and wall himself off from the public. The Nixon administration had no intention of seeking national unity in the fractious atmosphere of 1969; soon after taking office, the President declared that antiwar protests were a symptom of decadence: "It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die." His Vice President Spiro Agnew promoted this project more openly: "I say it is time for a positive polarization. ... It is time to rip away the rhetoric and divide on authentic lines." Before long, it had become Nixon's deliberate strategy to drive wedges through the Democratic Party along the lines of race, class, and position on the war, with the goal of breaking the country into pieces on the assumption that the Republicans could have "far the larger half," as Patrick Buchanan wrote. Likewise, President Bush followed his "uniter, not a divider" and "president of all the people" pledges by shutting Democrats out and restricting public access to the White House even before September 11 gave him a much freer hand to invoke national security and assert that anyone not with us was against us.

The Nixon administration used the Vietnam War to claim increased executive power, including the authority to wiretap, without warrants and in defiance of the Constitution, anyone whom they believed was intending to "attack and subvert the government by unlawful means." The Bush administration has likewise used the War on Terror to claim that the President has an unlimited power to wage war, violate treaties and legislation, spy on, lock up, interrogate, and not "torture"--because Americans do not torture--but deprive of sleep, food, and air (short of death) anyone whom it sees fit, American citizen or not.
-snip-
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read on

put them in prison

[madokie]

1. And this is exactly why I have confidence in the outcome of this tyrany as being good for us

I'm not sure tyrany is the right word but I think its obvious what I'm trying to say.