[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Reading the latest Glenzilla piece on the shameful, disgraceful, acutely embarrassing Obama administration’s Bushian embrace of gutting habeas corpus one is left with an obvious urgent question: why?
The few times this question is obliquely answered in the various reeking, disgusting perusals of the story the answer is always the old standby: power greed. Give any President the chance at greater powers and they will always take it, oh well.
I don’t buy it. First, there’s far too much on the empirical record of Obama as a Senator and candidate that expressly defends habeas corpus and makes a screaming mockery of his present position. Obama obviously thinks he can get away with it, but why sacrifice so much integrity and adherence to principle for a Bush totalitarian junta squish on the constitution? Obama is a constitutional professor at the University of Chicago, what on earth could motivate him to duplicate George Bush on this issue?
Look at the power being defended: the right for a President, on any whim, to pluck anyone off the planet, stuff them in a secret prison and offer them no chance for a fair hearing or charge for their imprisonment. If you’re a needledick Republican with an authority fetish this is great, but in real executive terms this is trifling stuff, will it deliver single-payer health care or solutions to the financial crisis? Not hardly, and before Bush its sickening ability was never an executive issue.
So if this god-awful stance on habeas corpus is a manifest political disgrace and delivers hardly anything tangible, is the Obama administration taking power for power’s sake? Right. No way, there has to be something else here, and usually in any other another scenario of obfuscation it’s always the other great standby: cover-up. They don’t want power, they’re hiding something.
This is impossible, they’re only been in power a few months, far too little time to commit crimes or scandals. Yet, inexorably, the answer always circles back to this possible motivator, and it starts to make perfect sense when one realizes the Obama team isn’t putting Bush’s jock strap on their heads before they go into court to defend themselves, they’re defending the current Democratic Party leadership and brand.
View the issue through the prism of culpability: did Bush obtain his shameful power grab with Democratic Party leadership knowledge and acquiescence? Very likely. Cheney and Rove were master political manipulators who delighted in knifing and humiliating Democrats, to the everlasting fury of their hapless constituents. It’s easy to forget in 2009, but just seven to nine years ago Democrats were getting rolled and humiliated on a weekly basis in sickening weakness that was not warranted in the least, and eventually sparked the Howard Dean candidacy.
I don’t empirically know, of course, but what I think happened is that to gain as much political cover as necessary Cheney and Rove informed—and then got approval—to become marauding global felons with the express permission of Democratic Party leadership. They never had to use it, but it was nice insurance, and in just that one window of awful political weakness Cheney and Rive swooped in and happily let Reid and Pelosi—at the very least—totally cripple themselves.
This is why ideas of truth commissions and investigations into Bush felonies go absolutely nowhere in Congress, even though they offer incredible political and moral advantages (can anyone with a remotely straight face state that Karl Rove would pass up the chance to imprison felonious Democrats if he had the chance? Jesus Christ). All the Democratic Party leadership is culpable to Bush felonies to some extent, no one knows to what, but it has to be there, it’s the only reason for Obama’s people to so shame us like this.
Needless to say I think this Obama habeas corpus political strategy is a acid, knifing disgrace, and if Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, Durbin and lord knows how many others signed up for Bush felonies they can get it over with and resign. Today.
Accountability is a vastly foreign concept to our elites in New York and DC, as we all ruefully know, and obviously—campaign promises meaning nothing—Obama has chosen to hide and enable terrible, terrible Democratic leadership behavior. Obscure and deny for as long as possible in the hopes it all just fades away.
If Obama were a man and a real constitutional professor he’d drop this disastrous stance and accept the resignations of all Democratic Party leadership this afternoon and tell the truth to the country. Obama, of course, is a politician and President, so as is so often the case the little people and the constitution are knifed and alone, mourning what could have been as they’re chucked in trash and given up on.