Robert C. Koehler: 'Shadow America: 'Worst president in history' may force
us to reclaim our principles'
Robert C. Koehler, Common Wonders
Since Congress won't seriously entertain the impeachment of George Bush,
fed-up segments of the American public are taking matters into their own
hands and "impeaching" him symbolically. It's part of the phenomenon of the
Bush administration's unraveling.
Historians recently joined the fun, with more than half the participants in
a recent poll conducted by History News Network ranking Bush on a par with
such washouts as James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover, and
fully 12 percent -- a large number for such a wait-and-see bunch --
declaring him flat-out the worst president in American history. A cover
story in Rolling Stone last month by Princeton's Sean Wilentz, a leading
U.S. historian, announced the ignominious verdict.
"Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties . . . have divided
the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off," Wilentz
wrote. "In each case, different factors contributed to the failure:
disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks,
executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however,
is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled
badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness
common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence
to a simplistic ideology."
The case Wilentz makes to support this verdict cites, to my mind, a fairly
conservative list of Bush atrocities and incompetencies: the war, the
wrecked economy, the deficit, Katrina, Plamegate, fundamentalist hostility
to science and subversion of the Constitution. There's plenty more that
belongs in the dossier -- e.g., global warming cop-out, pre-9/11
intelligence malfunction, the popularization of torture and (if the truth
ever reaches the mainstream media) vote fraud in three elections -- but why
bother? The stench is already powerful enough to indicate we're in the
deepest part of the landfill. Bush is the worst prez ever. Ouch. History is
waiting for him with a broom and dustpan.
Yet contemplating this brings only the hollowest satisfaction -- I guess
because it feels like nothing more than jeering from the bleachers, and
citizenship isn't a spectator sport.
While one day, when everything's back on track, W may stand for "Worst,"
today it stands for "Warning!" The guy now occupying the White House may
well be the most dangerous president in American history, and not because
he's an aberration, but rather because he's homegrown and recognizable: the
worst of who we are, dressed up in a suit and power tie. We need to rouse
ourselves, as citizens, and stand between this reeling administration and .
.. . the Constitution. The rest of the world.
Consider the appalling matter of Bush's moral leadership: the lies and
self-serving leaks and reckless doctrine of pre-emptive war and, maybe most
of all, the torture. Bush's big accomplishment in this area has not been to
blaze new ground in the mistreatment of detainees -- such techniques as
water-boarding, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation weren't invented on
his watch -- but rather to strip America of its face-saving hypocrisy.
"But let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the
openness," Naomi Klein wrote recently in The Guardian. "Past administrations
kept their 'black ops' secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were
committed in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush
administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to
torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws."
When we dredge our shadow history, we confront a host of horrors. Every
decade has its secret graves. In the '80s of Ronald Reagan, not only were we
allied with a Saddam Hussein at the height of his murderous power, but we
were also training Central American death-squad goons at our School of the
Americas and supporting and underwriting the regimes in whose names they
spread their terror. Both Reagan and Jimmy Carter, of course, were enamored
of Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen of Afghanistan, who morphed into the
Taliban.
In the '60s and '70s, the CIA-run Phoenix Program was responsible for the
deaths of 20,000 Vietnamese and the torture of thousands more. And as Alfred
McCoy, author of "A Question of Torture," notes, the CIA spent a billion
dollars researching torture and coercion techniques in the '50s and early
'60s; the extraordinary results of these experiments are now on display at
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
"When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is
torture," Klein wrote, "what dies is what Hannah Arendt called 'the
juridical person in man.' Soon victims no longer bother to search for
justice, so sure are they of the futility, and danger, of that quest. This
is a larger mirror of what happens inside the torture chamber, when
prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear
them and no one is going to save them."
We dare not wait for history to impeach George W. Bush. We need to head him
off at the pass right now, and not let him, in the two and a half years
remaining in his term, add to his legacy as "the worst president in
history" -- by, say, attacking Iran.
Indeed Bush, with his naked agenda, has presented the nation with an
extraordinary opportunity to redefine itself. If a citizens' movement can
rescue basic American principles of justice and fairness from the
realpolitik compromises of the last half century, we'll owe W, in his
neutered retirement, a thank-you note for waking us up.
(c) Robert C. Koehler
Source: Common Wonders
http://commonwonders.com/
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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