Bush has just given the Democrats a major gift. The trouble is that they are madly spineless and too afraid to use it or even recognize it for what it is.
What is it, one wonders? A re-affirmation of his war powers.
Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.
Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush’s advisers assert that many Americans may have forgotten that. So they want Congress to say so and “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”
The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.
Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration’s effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress.
What's the one thing (short of ending the war altogether) that the Democratic Congress could do to convince people, finally, that they represent something different and that "things are gonna change"?
End the WOT bullshit and restore democracy, of course. No more torture, no more monarchic superpowers, no more spying on Americans. A return to sanity and a turn away from dictatorship. Simply by refusing to re-affirm the Bush/Cheney power-grab, the Democrats in Congress would be sending a message mere weeks brfore the election that if Obama is elected they will indeed reverse FISA, reverse the idiotic PATRIOT Act, undo the unConstitutional MCA, end the show trials and release most of the Gitmo detainees. And that's just the beginning.
So with everything to gain by doing it and a lot to lose in terms of respect if they don't, why do I think they won't accept this gift and reject Bush's provision?
Well, I could say again that the Democrats as presently led and for all I know constituted, are leaning just as heavily toward the autocratic as the Pubs. They like the power and they want Democratic presidents to have it. As conservatives, they are drawn toward the accumulation of power as a fly is drawn to an accumulation of shit. They want to touch it, caress it, feed off it like the damn Republicans get to do. "When is it our turn?" And because Bush did it for them, they don't even have to take the rap for violating the Constitutional separation of powers and crowning a president.
But you keep rejecting that one, so let's go to one you might actually consider:
They're afraid.
They're afraid that by rejecting the phony WOT the GOP will be able to draw a big red target on their backs and accuse them of hating America. "They won't even acknowledge the war we're in!" the Republicans will scream, and the Democrats will have no answer and lose the election. Or so leaders like Harry Reid keep telling us. That's been the story for decades, hardened into orthodoxy by two Clinton victories engineered by DLC strategists who overvalued their tactics and undervalued Clinton's considerable personal political skills.
We have to do whatever they would do on "national security" not because they're right and we're wrong but because they're perceived to be right while we are perceived to be weenies and America-haters who won't protect the country from its hypothetical enemies.
And so fear will prevent them from accepting this simultaneously political and moral gift to them and the nation, and the WOT will be enshrined in the pantheon of untouchable traditional myths along with Reagan's responsibility for bringing down the Berlin Wall and John Edwards losing the nomination because his primped his hair. Might as well carve it over the entrance to Congress now as wait:
"We have always been at war with Oceania the Taliban/AQ jihadists."
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