Sunday 16th November 2008
Snooping Near Camp David
11:43 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 7
I tromped out to the Catoctin Mountains next to Camp David last weekend. Good scenery, considering the neighborhood. I was pleased to see that TSA was not operating a checkpoint for access to the mountain.
There is a restaurant - actually, an “inn” - in nearby Thurmont, MD that proudly advertises that it is popular with Secret Service agents who spend time at Camp David.
I didn’t notice a parade of scantily-dressed tarts parading in front of the inn, so the Thurmont police department is apparently not entrapping the Secret Service agents as brazenly as the DC police recently did. The Washington Post reported that the agent, ”driving his Secret Service vehicle and in uniform, encountered the undercover officer about 12:50 a.m. near 11th and K streets NW… After bantering about prices and services, the woman agreed to perform oral sex for $20 and told the [agent] to meet her around the corner. He was arrested there by D.C. police officers…”
The Post did not report whether the $20 price included a discount for uniformed officers.
[full size versions of the photos below are available at my Flickr page here.]
Friday 14th November 2008
Photos from the George Mason Spiel
9:51 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 6
I want to thank the George Mason University Economics Society and the Future of Freedom Foundation for inviting me to speak yesterday at GMU. The pizza was a hit and there was a lively back-and-forth with the audience on lots of subjects.
I also want to thank Professor Thomas Rustici. He has assigned Lost Rights as a textbook for quite a few years and it was a real treat for me to meet so many students who had read that book, including several who swore they enjoyed it.
Morgan Ashcom, a great young professional photographer (who is also a libertarian), took a series of photos at the event. I am reposting here with his permission. Check out his website - he is based in the DC area and is building up a very strong porfolio.
Wednesday 12th November 2008
Do Presidents Have the Right to Kill?
12:06 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 4
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today my piece on the August Freedom Daily on whether presidents have the right to kill.
Unfortunately, this was not an issue during the presidential campaign. Instead, the media obsessed on which candidate deserved nearly-boundless power.
DO PRESIDENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL? Freedom Daily August 2008
Should the President of the United States be exempt from both American and international law?
Few people would instinctively say yes. But, in actual practice, presidents of the United States have been legally untouchable for most of the past century for the foreign killings they ordered. Even when their orders resulted in the killing of vast numbers of innocent people, it was almost never suggested in this country that the president should face charges for war crimes.
That was true when Woodward Wilson intervened in Mexico and Haiti, and it was true of Republican interventions throughout Latin America in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt approved the carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women and children. Harry Truman approved the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But those were not war crimes because the victims lived under governments which the United States had publicly announced it must destroy.
In the Korean War, U.S. troops followed rules of engagement that ensured that large numbers of Korean women and children would be killed. Towns and villages were routinely flattened by U.S. bombers. But it was okay because they were fighting in a military campaign (or a “police action,” as Truman said) authorized by the president. The U.S. military in Korea formally defined “war crimes” as actions done by the Communists, not by the United States and its allies.
In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson approved preemptive attacks on villages and entire broad swaths of South Vietnam held by — or suspected of sympathizing with — the Viet Cong. He never faced the prospect of being charged with war crimes in the United States in part because he managed to sell his carnage to the American people as a necessary defense of freedom. The “better dead than Red” motto justified killing peasants to prevent them from becoming Communists.
Richard Nixon upped Johnson’s ante in Cambodia and Laos. But until he announced a massive invasion of Cambodia, his secret bombing of villages in that country spurred only a few newspaper stories. And all that the U.S. government had to do was deny the facts and the media would mosey along as if nothing had happened.
When Nixon was threatened with impeachment, it was not for the innocent civilians who had perished in his bombing escalations. Regardless of the number of victims, his policies were not treated as criminal offenses. Perhaps the Democrats did not want to imperil the prerogatives they expected to exploit when they recaptured the White House.
When Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, most of the American media went along for the ride, treating his unprovoked assault on Serbia as if it were little more than a U.S. effort to bring enlightenment to a dark corner of the world. The hundreds of Serb and ethnic Albanian women and children killed by American bombs and missiles rarely rated even an asterisk on the American political scene. As long as Clinton proclaimed his good intentions, his killings were simply proof of his devotion to humanity.
Killing foreigners seems to be a perk of the modern presidency — akin to the band’s playing “Hail to the Chief” when he enters the room. Yet, if a foreign ruler authorized killing Americans the way the U.S. president authorizes killing Somalis, or Afghans, or Pakistanis, Americans would almost certainly consider the foreign attacks acts of war.
This prerogative to kill civilians without consequence is especially dangerous now that George W. Bush is revving up his war threats against Iran. British newspapers reported that the Pentagon has a list of thousands of bombing targets. The White House and the Pentagon have engaged in saber rattling off and on ever since late 2003. Various news reports in May assert that administration officials are talking of attacking Iran by the end of the summer.
Almost no one claims that Iran poses a current threat to the United States. Yet few people in Washington seem willing to deny the president’s right to attack Iran. It is as if the presidential whim is sufficient to justify blasting any foreign nation that does not kowtow to the commands of the U.S. government — as long as the U.S. government also alleges that the foreign regime might possess weapons of mass destruction now or at some point in the next decade. Some Democrats have said they would oppose such a war but showed little enthusiasm for supporting legislation that would make it clear that the president had no authority to attack Tehran.
The fact that thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iranians might die seems to be irrelevant. Bush appears far more concerned about baseball statistics than the body counts compiled by the U.S. military abroad. The fact that many Americans could also die — either during the attack or from Iranian retaliation on U.S. forces in Iraq — doesn’t appear to be costing him any sleep.
Attacking Iran will put American civilians in the terrorist crosshairs, with little or no federal Kevlar to protect them. The key question is not whether terrorists will attack but how the American people will be likely to respond and how politicians could exploit the situation. David Addington, Dick Cheney’s top aide, told Jack Goldsmith, a former top Bush appointee in the Justice Department and now a Harvard Law professor, that the United States is one terrorist “bomb away from getting rid” of the court created to curtail the president’s wiretaps on other Americans.
Power and immunity
The Bush administration, like other administrations before it, could reap a windfall of new power if foreigners respond violently to unprovoked U.S. violence. Goldsmith observes in his book The Terror Presidency, “The president and the vice president always made clear that a central administration priority was to maintain and expand the president’s formal legal powers.”
And the power to attack foreign nations is one of the most valued prerogatives of today’s Republicans.
Bush’s top advisors — and especially Vice President Cheney — are devoted to a Nixonian view of absolute power for the commander in chief. After he was driven out of office in disgrace, Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”
This seems to be the attitude towards Iran of Bush and his war planners. Pentagon Deputy Assistant Secretary Debra Cagan told several British members of Parliament last year that “I hate all Iranians.” Perhaps Cagan got her position because of such prejudice towards nations that Bush formally designated as “evil.” At the same time that Congress is considering hate-crime legislation, ethnic hatred may be driving U.S. plans to slaughter Iranians.
The power that Bush and prior presidents have used has been buttressed by a corrupted notion of sovereign immunity. The essence of sovereign immunity is that “the king can do no wrong.” But as Jeremy Travis, a professor of criminology at CUNY, noted, “The oldest purported rationale for the immunity of the sovereign … is a perversion of its historical intendment, which was that the king was privileged to do no wrong.”
As one English lawyer explained in the wake of James II’s fall, “When a king … does wrong, he thereby ceases to be king…. God and the law are above the king.”
But, in the contemporary statist interpretation, a phrase intended to prevent kings from injuring subjects becomes a license for government abuses.
Launching an unprovoked aggressive war was recognized as a war crime at the Nuremberg tribunals in 1946, which declared that to “initiate a war of aggression” is not only an international crime; it is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” But the Nuremberg principles, like the Geneva Conventions, seem to be long out of fashion in Washington. A president is not considered to have launched a “war of aggression” as long as he publicly asserts some uplifting purpose at the time he commences killing.
No American politician has ever been sentenced to prison for ordering U.S. soldiers to kill innocent foreigners. But the fact that the carnage is inflicted beyond U.S. borders should no longer be sufficient to immunize the killing.
As long as politicians can order killings of innocent people without fearing for their own necks, the government has far too much power. America is long overdue for war crimes trials. The United States cannot act as if 96 percent of the world’s population have no rights — including the right to life — that the U.S. government is obliged to respect.
The president and his top officials should face the same perils and procedures common citizens face when they are accused of breaking the law. To investigate the president and his top aides will not imperil the American people. Seeing a president answer for his crimes would be uplifting. It is interesting to consider the subsequent course of American foreign policy if Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon had been tried, convicted in federal court, and publicly punished for committing war crimes.
Americans cannot expect to have good presidents if presidents are permitted to make themselves tsars. If an American president refuses to restrain himself in his foreign warrings, Americans should draw on the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes the threat of a Nuremberg noose is the best way to put government back on a leash.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday 11th November 2008
I’m Speaking Thursday (11/13) at George Mason Univ.
8:46 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 1
The Future of Freedom Foundation and the George Mason University Econ Society invited me to speak on this Thursday evening (11/13) as part of their Economic Liberty Lecture /dinner Series.
Admission and the dinner are free and the movie alone should be worth the trip.
ECONOMIC LIBERTY LECTURE SERIES - Dinner, Lecture, and Movie
DATE: November 13, 2008 – Thursday
PLACE: GMU Enterprise Hall 80 [[Here is a link to a map of the GMU campus]
TIME: 5:30 pm – Dinner
6:00 pm – Talk with Q&A
7:30 pm – Movie
ADMISSION: FREE
SPEAKER: James Bovard
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (2006) and eight other books, including the award winning Lost Rights (1994). He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. He is policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation, a contributing editor of The Freeman, and The American Conservative, and a regular contributor to Freedom Daily.
MOVIE: Brazil
“Part social commentary, part outrageous fantasy, this black comedy presents a future where society is completely controlled by an inefficient government. Sam Lowrey (Jonathan Pryce) is a daydreaming civil servant who spots an error in a sea of paperwork, leading to the arrest of an innocent man. While Lowrey attempts to right the wrongful arrest, the state incorrectly assumes him to be terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) and goes after him.”
Presented by: GMU Econ Society
www.gmueconsociety.blogspot.com
The Future of Freedom Foundation
www.fff.org fff@fff.org 703-934-6101
Directions: George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA.
Visitors should park in the Mason Pond Parking Deck off Mason Pond Dr. –the third level is just a short walk to Enterprise Hall. Cost is $2 per hour; $8 max per day. All Parking Inquiries: 703-993-2710.
Monday 10th November 2008
Pure Politics? The New Jersey Definition of “Private and Personal”
1:13 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 5
People sometimes ask me why I am prejudiced towards New Jersey and/or politicians.
Depending on how much coverage the story below receives, the New Jersey Tourist Bureau may need to buy some more advertisements in the Washington area.
I will be curious to see whether this guy’s lawyers try to get charges dropped on the grounds that the city council member was merely doing in actuality what politicians do metaphorically for a living.
Or maybe they will claim that this guy was simply exercising the New Jersey version of Lese Majeste.
*******
Reports Link N.J. Politician to Arrest at Club
By Elissa Silverman and Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writers Monday, November 10, 2008; B03
A City Council member from Jersey City was arrested over the weekend after patrons at a Northwest Washington nightclub complained that someone had urinated on them from the balcony, according to police and media reports.
A D.C. police spokesman said Steven Lipski was arrested about 9:50 p.m. and charged with simple assault. A police incident report, which did not name the suspect, gave his age as 44. Another police report listed Lipski as a resident of Jersey City. Public records for the Steven Lipski who sits on the Jersey City council list his age as 43 or 44.
Jennifer Morrill, a spokeswoman for Jersey City, said last night that she did not have all the details about what she termed a “private, personal matter.” ….
Thursday 6th November 2008
Great Spoof on Obama Supporters Without a Cause
9:59 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 7
The crisis with Obama supporters is far worse than I thought.
The sad proof is here.
Has anybody seen a good roundup of quotes by the media, pundits, & other such ilk gushing about how we are entering a new age of idealism? Trumpeting how Obama’s victory redeems democracy, America, et. al.??
Tuesday 4th November 2008
Rascals Whupped & Kicked Out of Office!
10:39 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 10
The vast majority of rascals are getting reelected tonight. That’s the bad news.
But since I am a “glass one-eighth full” kind of guy, let’s focus on some of the bad guys going down in flames.
Here are two of my favs from the evening so far. Who else should we be celebrating here?
Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican and one of the most pious and greasiest members of the House, just conceded victory. He weaseled his way into another term in 2006 and then double-crossed voters who thought he had reformed.
Elizabeth Dole just saw her Senate career crash and burn. At least North Carolinians have repented of their folly in electing her in 2002.
I had some fun with Dole’s campaign for the presidency. Here’s the lead paragraphs of a piece touting her achievements from the American Spectator from June 1999:
HEADLINE: Liddy Dole’s Regulatory Ride
BYLINE: James Bovard.
Maybe it is my fault that Elizabeth Dole is famously terrified of “unscripted” encounters with the press.
Ten years ago, researching an article on a federal job training program for Reader’s Digest, I asked for an interview with then-Secretary of Labor Dole. Her press secretary put me off, first wanting to know whether the secretary’s picture would appear with the piece. (I told her that, since I was a mere freelancer, such matters were out of my hands.) Finally, after much suspense, I learned that a 30-minute meeting would be granted.
On October 12, 1989, Bill Schulz, the managing editor of Reader’s Digest, and I arrived for our appointment with Dole. We barely had time to enter her palatial office suite and sit down before the secretary launched into a filibuster about what the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) meant to her. She picked up a framed photograph from her desk showing her hugging a black teenage girl at a White House ceremony the previous July, and recalled: “She cried–and I cried–and we hugged!” Dole kept talking rapidly, seemingly to run down the clock.
I finally interrupted her in mid-sentence and asked, if JTPA was such a well-run program, why had it given $3 million to finance a gay job-matching network run by the Gay and Lesbian Service Center in Los Angeles?
Dole froze. After a pause, she said she did not know anything about that. Schulz and I asked for her response to findings of the General Accounting Office and the Labor Department’s inspector general about deep structural flaws in the program. Looking indignant, she declared that she had not expected to be asked those kind of questions. She showed no awareness of any of the major criticisms raised by the government’s own auditors. About this time, I noticed that the press secretary’s knees were visibly shaking and I feared that the young woman might faint at any moment. Dole soon made it clear that the interview was over.
Elizabeth Dole is revered by moderates and much of the media, hailed as the Republican answer to the gender gap, and treated as one of our most distinguished public servants. In fact, during her tenures as Reagan’s secretary of transportation and Bush’s secretary of labor–the most significant jobs in her political career–Dole blundered blindly from one wrongheaded and costly program to the next. Having helped open some of the worst public policy Pandora’s boxes of recent decades, she remains oblivious to the resulting damage. Now touted as a realistic possibility for the Republican presidential nomination, her record suggests that she would actually be more at home in the
pro-regulation, anti-business mainstream of the Democratic Party.
Thursday 30th October 2008
My 2 Cents on the 2008 Elections
8:51 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Elective Dictatorship | Comments: 6
Reason magazine posted yesterday their responses from various libertarians they sent a set of questions on the 2008 election. Following is the response I sent them last week. (Their initial article did not include my responses, but they added them in after I sent a YO DUDE! email their way.)
** I will post some further thoughts on this subject periodically between now and Tuesday evening.
WHO’S GETTING YOUR VOTE? REASON SURVEY OCTOBER 2008
1. Who are you voting for in November?
Bob Barr. He is the most pro-freedom candidate. He has long done great work against the Surveillance State, in favor of the Second amendment, and on other issues. (Disclosure: I have done some work for the Barr campaign).
2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000?
I voted for Badnarik in 2004, and didn’t vote in 2000.
3. Is this the most important election in your lifetime?
It is the most important election since 2006, and maybe even 2004. Elections are vastly overrated as a means for restraining government abuses. The more people who believe that the 2008 election will end the abuses of the Bush era, the easier it will be for the next president to perpetuate Bush’s noxious principles and precedents.
4. What will you miss about the Bush administration?
If Obama wins, a torrent of Washington conservatives will suddenly proclaim that the federal government poses a dire threat to our rights and liberties. I will miss the honest conservatism of the GWB era - when many conservatives stopped pretending to give a damn about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and denounced as traitors anyone who did not kowtow to the Commander-in-Chief.
5. Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded?
I would not want to see any of them waterboarded, but I would like to see all of them forced to disclose all of their presidential papers and compelled to sit under cross examination for as many weeks or months as it takes for Americans to learn the extent of their abuses in office. And they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for any crimes they committed.
James Bovard is the author of eight books, most recently Attention Deficit Democracy.
****
Friday 24th October 2008
Podcast now online of Antiwar/Scott Horton Radio Interview
8:08 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 11
The podcast of Wednesday’s radio interview with Scott Horton is now online here.
We had a rattlin’ good discussion, covering a heap of topics and clobbering politicians left and right.
Thus far, I have not been contacted by the lawyers for the West Virginia Anti-Defamation League.
Thursday 23rd October 2008
Did the Marines Die in Beirut for Absolute Power?
8:42 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 6
This is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. President Reagan sent in U.S. troops to try to help stabilize Lebanon after the Israeli invasion (and massacres by Israeli proxies in Palestinian refugee camps) the prior year. This was Reagan’s biggest antiterrorism debacle. He failed the Marines and he compounded the abuse by lying about it to the American people. But apologists for the U.S. warring continue to invoke the sacrifice of the Marines to vindicate practically any and all proposed U.S. invasions of foreign countries.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page today contains a piece implying that the Marines perished as a result of Democrats trying to limit the president’s power to intervene abroad. Robert Turner insists, “Had it not been for crass political partisanship, and efforts by Sen. Joe Biden and other congressional liberals to usurp the constitutional powers of the president, the loss of life in Beirut may have been avoided.” In reality, the folly and blame lies in those responsible for sending the troops to Lebanon, not for those trying to bring them home.
Turner then proceeds to blame 9/11 on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which attempted to limit the power of the president to wiretap any phone call he pleased. Turner implies that the only reason the 9/11 attacks were not detected was because U.S. government spies did not have boundless power to intrude on communications in America. This is tripe, as the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 Commission showed. The subtitle on his article captures his message: “Liberal assaults on the executive branch have made us vulnerable.”
Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, has an article in the New York Times with a different song-and-dance on the anniversary. McFarlane says that the problem with the U.S. incursion into Lebanon was that the U.S. military did not plunge itself massively into the Lebanese civil war: “I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role — to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recognized that it would be folly to commence a general war against Muslim forces.
I wrote about Reagan’s Lebanon debacle in Terrorism & Tyranny and for Counterpunch in 2003, looking at the Beirut debacle as a microcosm of the growing fiasco in Iraq. I concluded back then, “The Reagan administration paid no political price for its Beirut debacle. Reagan and Bush Sr. succeeded in falsifying, blustering, and smearing their way out of political trouble. Now, two decades later, the only ‘lesson’ that seems to be recalled is to stick resolutely to floundering policies - at least until the number of dead soldiers threatens to become politically toxic.”
Wednesday 22nd October 2008
I’m on Antiwar.com Radio/KAOS Radio Today (Wed.) at 1:15 pm Eastern Time
10:02 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0
Scott Horton and I will be bantering about Bush and other disasters today (Wed., 10/22) at 1:15 pm Eastern.
I think you can listen live either here (Listen Live link is on left hand side) or here. (I’m not sure on the latter link.)
The program should be available as a podcast within the next day or two.
Saturday 18th October 2008
Libertarians Still Lusting for Palin?
10:03 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Uncategorized | wool | Comments: 11
Is anyone closely tracking Sarah Palin’s continued popularity with libertarians?
Charles Murray, one of the Beltway’s favorite libertarians (ensconced at the manically pro-war American Enterprise Institute), told the New York Times that he is “truly and deeply in love” with Palin.
Joe Bast, the head of the Heartland Institute, said that Palin “was a great choice [for Vice President] for all the familiar reasons - she’s more free-market, has more executive experience, and is smarter than either McCain or Obama. What’s not to like? In a better world, she’d be running for president, not vice president.” Bast, writing in the October-November issue of the Heartland newsletter, also praises Palin’s “zero tolerance for government corruption.”
Has anyone compiled a list of other prominent libertarians who have gushed over America’s best-known moose hunter?
I continue to be mystified at how Palin could have become an instant saint for so many libertarians. The woman is and has long been a professional politician. Her performance in the debate with Joe Biden (another perfidious professional politician) should have shattered her halo once and for all - at least for anyone who doesn’t support perpetual U.S. warring around the globe.
Sunday 12th October 2008
My 2 Cents on Palin, Obama, Dumb Voters, & the 2008 Election
3:55 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Elective Dictatorship | Comments: 9
Robert Zullo of the Houma Courier (of Houma, Louisiana, in Terrebonne parish, near New Orleans) interviewed me on Thursday on the 2008 election. His article in today’s paper very nicely captures how voters are making decisions as they head towards the voting booth.
He kindly included a number of quotes from me in his piece, which I reckon I can reprint without trampling federal copyright law.
Local voters weigh in on their presidential picks
By Robert Zullo
Senior Staff Writer
Published: Sunday, October 12, 2008
……
….
James Bovard, a former journalist and Libertarian-minded author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” and other books on the state of American government and the U.S. electorate, said the 2008 campaign has been “a great year for cynics.”
Bovard said “sound bytes and slurs” exert too much influence on the electorate. “Folks have been satisfied with phrases instead of making the effort to understand the policy,” he added.
Part of the problem, Bovard said, is government has become much bigger, policies have become more complex and, at the same time, the average citizen has made little or any effort to keep up.
“This basically puts politicians on the honor system,” Bovard said, adding that distortions and falsehoods spread by campaigns are aided by news media that can be “cowardly” or just as ignorant as the voters they seek to inform. “It’s easier to get away with lies nowadays.”
…In the last eight years, much of which was dominated by the Republican party control of the executive and legislative branches, the GOP has “expanded government in so many ways,” Bovard said, pointing to farm subsidies and Republican complicity in the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
“People have gotten vested in politicians and certain political parties and they are blind to the faults and blind to the lies,” Bovard said.
Voters and media also fail to fully investigate campaign issues, such as Barack Obama’s support for increasing ethanol production.
“This is a good example of an ultimate bogus issue,” he said. “It’s a very poor source of fuel, but it’s good for the farm lobby.”
Bovard also said he was mystified by the popular excitement generated by Obama and Palin in their respective parties.
“Something I find almost comical is that some of the Obama supporters seem to think the only thing that’s necessary in order to have a government that serves people is a new set of politicians in charge. Both parties are complicit in many of the abuses of the last eight years,” Bovard said.
Given her lack of experience, he was also amused by that “people have read so many positive qualities” into Palin, who was the mayor of small Alaskan town just two years ago.
“All of a sudden she’s a new Joan of Arc,” he said.
“First and foremost she’s a politician,” Bovard said, adding that to some extent the same phenomenon extends to Obama. “Folks somehow think these two people have somehow transcended the follies that are the bad traits of their class. … It’s almost as if people are desperate for a savior. I think that explains some of the reaction to Palin and also Obama.”
************
Friday 10th October 2008
YouTube version of my “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties” speech now online
10:09 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0
The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today the YouTube version of my “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties” spiel from their June conference.
You can see all the video clips here.
The speech did not include any Hillary jokes.
Wednesday 8th October 2008
McCain Jumps the Gun with “My Fellow Prisoners”
5:04 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 8
In a speech today, John McCain told the audience: “Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners.”
Here is a 13 second YouTube clip from the speech.
I thought McCain had been in politics long enough to know not to notify people that he was nullifying all their rights until after the election.
Friday 3rd October 2008
Freedom is Still the Preeminent Issue
2:21 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | dictatorship | Comments: 13
The Foundation for Economic Education posted online my piece from the current issue of their Freeman magazine responding to David Brooks’s call to devalue freedom in American poiltics.
Freedom Is Not the Issue? It Just Ain’t So! The Freeman September 2008
By James Bovard
The Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom. In a May op-ed piece in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks announced, “The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individualfreedom. Political leaders have to also talk about . . . ‘the whole way we live our lives.’ ”
Brooks, the “liberal” media’s favorite “conservative,” has long sought to place a halo over Big Government. In 1996 he urged Americans to forget their fears of politicians and embrace “national greatness.” He proclaimed that “energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project.” Brooks’s paean to government was almost indistinguishable from a 1932 tribute by Benito Mussolini, who declared, “It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity; harmonizing their various interests through justice, and transmitting to future generations the mental conquests of science, of art, of law, of human solidarity.”
But fascist ideas are not tolerated in the United States—if they are labeled fascistic.
In last May’s article Brooks gushed over how British conservatives are placing “more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate.” When Brooks talks about “moral climate,” he presumably means politicians lecturing citizens about the need to act responsibly. Brooks ignores the fact that the greatest irresponsibility comes from politicians. Consider his reaction to one of the worst abuses of the Bush presidency.
Brooks was a gung-ho advocate of invading Iraq. In the days after the Abu Ghraib torture photos appeared in May 2004, he bewailed; “We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes. . . . Far from being blinded by greed, we were blinded by idealism.” Brooks and other pundits congratulated themselves for having swallowed politicians’ hokum and leading their readers and the nation over a cliff.
His response to the torture scandal epitomizes how he wants Americans to view government. People are supposed to believe wonderful things about it. Then, when government commits atrocities, people are supposed to “move along because there is nothing to see here.” Instead, it is on to the next opportunity to put government on a pedestal and urge everyone to bow down to it.
The great political issue of our times is not liberalism versus conservatism, or capitalism versus socialism, but statism—the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of compulsion, that vesting arbitrary power in government officials will make the people happy eventually. What type of entity is the state? Is it a highly efficient, purring engine, like a hovercraft sailing deftly above the lives of ordinary citizens? Or is it a lumbering giant bulldozer that rips open the soil and ends up clear-cutting the lives of people it was created to help?
The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. The more government power has grown, the more unfashionable it becomes to discuss or recognize the abuses, as though it were bad form to count the dead from government interventions. There seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among many pundits and political scientists to pretend that government is something loftier than it actually is and to wear white gloves when discussing the nature of the state.
Government Without Romance
Unfortunately, individuals often are unaware of government’s true record because the media are working hand in glove with the ruling class.
Statists rely on political arithmetic that begins by erasing all of government’s abuses from the ledger. Instead, people should begin by pretending that Leviathan doesn’t exist—and then ask what politicians can do to make the masses happy.
Modern political thinking largely consists of glorifying poorly functioning political machinery—the threats, bribes, and legislative cattle prods by which some people are made to submit to other people. It is a delusion to think of the state as something loftier than all the edicts, penalties, prison sentences, and taxes it imposes.
Like Tom Sawyer persuading his friends to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence, modern politicians expect people to be grateful for the chance to pay for the fetters that government attaches to them. Even though the average family now pays more in taxes than it spends for housing, clothing, and food combined, tax burdens are not an issue for most American political commentators.
To call for government intervention is to demand that some people be given the power to compel others to submit. But coercion is a blunt instrument that produces many ill effects aside from the purported government goal. To rely on coercion to achieve progress is like relying on bulldozers and steamrollers for routine transit. The question is not whether a person can eventually reach a goal driving a steamroller, but how much damage is left in his wake and how much faster the destination could be reached without crushing everything along the way.
Americans and Washington
Many people in Washington believe that Americans are so helpless that they cannot be fulfilled unless their rulers give them a reason to live. Brooks proclaimed in 1996 that “ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington.” He did not explain where exactly in the memos, meetings, and machinations which engross the capital that “American purpose” arises. Brooks warned that Americans’ mental health depends on the feds proclaiming a purpose for the people: “Without vigorous national vision, we are plagued by anxiety and disquiet.”
Recent opinion polls show that much of the anxiety in this nation is the result of the follies and deceits of the federal government. It was government and politicians, not freedom, that failed Americans in the new century. It was not freedom that wrecked the U.S. dollar. It was not freedom that made federal spending explode. It was not freedom that spurred a foreign war that has already left tens of thousands of Americans dead and maimed, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. It was not freedom which announced that the Constitution and the statute book no longer bind the president.
Brooks became a media darling in part because of his vehement warnings about the danger of cynicism. But it is not cynical to have more faith in freedom than in subjugation. It is not cynical to have more faith in individuals vested with rights than in bureaucrats armed with power. It is not cynical to suspect that governments which have cheated so often in the past may not be dealing straight today.
Trust no intellectual who tells you not to worry about Leviathan.
tagline: James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and other books.
Tuesday 30th September 2008
Bush’s Forgotten Iraqi Sovereignty Sham
7:58 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 8
The Future of Freedom Foundation just posted online my article from the July issue of Freedom Daily on Bush’s sovereignty shenanigans on Iraq.
It continues to amaze me how easily Bush and team got away with the Empire-State-Building-sized farces regarding Iraq. Unfortunately, “Bush re-subjugated Americans by claiming to have liberated Iraqis.”
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The Forgotten Iraqi-Sovereignty Sham Freedom Daily July 2008
by James Bovard
The Bush administration and the Iraqi government are wrangling over the future role of the U.S. government in Iraq. The Bush team wants far more power over Iraqis than the current Iraqi government wants to concede.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in April 2008 that the dispute is concentrated on “sensitive issues,” including the U.S. military’s right to imprison Iraqi citizens unilaterally and the legal immunity that American contractors enjoy. It is understandable that Iraqis would be sensitive on these points, since permitting foreigners to kill and imprison without legal consequence does make a mockery of Iraqi self-rule.
But the real surprise here is that there should be any such controversy. Didn’t the United States generously grant Iraq sovereignty over itself in 2004?
That was a key bragging point of the Bush reelection campaign that year. It was the ultimate proof that Bush is a great liberator and that the United States freed the Iraqi people. In an April 13, 2004, press conference, Bush declared, “On June 30th, when the flag of a free Iraq is raised, Iraqi officials will assume full responsibility for the ministries of government…. One central commitment of that mission is the transfer of the sovereignty back to the Iraqi people. We have set a deadline of June 30th. It is important that we meet that deadline. We will not step back from our pledge.”
Bush hyped the sovereignty turnover as the key to boosting Iraqis’ trust in America: “Were the coalition to step back from the June 30th pledge, many Iraqis would question our intentions and feel their hopes betrayed. And those in Iraq who trade in hatred and conspiracy theories would find a larger audience and gain a stronger hand.”
On June 28, 2004, Bush’s man in Baghdad, Coalition Provisional Authority Chief Paul Bremer, handed a leather-bound document to Iyad Allawi, the former CIA operative placed by the United States at the head of the interim Iraqi government. Because of fears of insurgent attacks during the sovereignty ceremony, the Bush administration secretly conveyed the document two days earlier than planned.
At the time, Bush was at a NATO summit in Turkey. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice handed him a slip of paper declaring, “Iraq is sovereign.” Bush jotted, “Let Freedom Reign” on a piece of paper and handed it back to Rice. Some Americans may have thought that this was the same phrase used on the first Independence Day in 1776. But “let freedom ring” is far different from “let freedom reign” — especially when “reign” meant the continued dominance of the U.S. military over a foreign country. Nevertheless, Bush proudly announced to the world, “The Iraqi people have their country back.”
He also announced that day, “This day also marks a proud moral achievement for members of our coalition. We pledged to end a dangerous regime, to free the oppressed, and to restore sovereignty. We have kept our word.”
And he bragged, “Not only is there full sovereignty in the hands of the Government, but all the ministries have been transferred, and they’re up and running.”
A Soviet-style sovereignty
However, prior to pseudo-abdicating, the Coalition Provisional Authority dictated that U.S. and British troops would have immunity from prosecution from the new Iraqi government, effectively creating a diplomatic corps of 160,000 people with guns and heavy weapons and no liability for wrongful killings. The sovereignty transfer did not impede the U.S. military from continuing to heavily bomb civilian areas and sweep up vast numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians for interrogation and detention.
Bremer’s electoral edict also dictated that “one of every three candidates on a party’s slate must be a woman.” In Bremer’s final weeks, he issued a flurry of edicts dictating long-term restrictions on Iraq’s new government and decreeing the hiring of more than 20 Iraqis for five-year terms in key positions. The Washington Post noted, “As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the U.S. occupation authority as “binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people” that will remain in force even after the transfer of political authority.”
Bush bragged in a July 13 Wisconsin speech, “Because we acted, Iraq is a free and sovereign nation.” But the puppet government was no model republic. One of Allawi’s first acts was to issue an edict giving himself dictatorial power “to impose curfews anywhere in the country, ban groups he considers seditious, and order the detentions of people suspected of being security risks.” The New York Times explained that Allawi “wants to show he can rule with an iron fist.”
Bush hit the same theme in an August 5 campaign speech in Saginaw, Michigan: “You see, when we acted to protect our own security, we also promised to help deliver them from tyranny, to restore their sovereignty, to set them on the path of liberty. And when America gives its word, America keeps its word.”
But Iraqi sovereignty from the beginning was intended to be a sham. The Iraqis would have self-government — and the proof would be that the American military will constantly remind them that they have self-government. The U.S. government did not intend to permit Iraqis to govern themselves in any way that did not suit the interests and demands of the Bush administration. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked on April 2, 2004, what impact the June 30 sovereignty arrival would have on the U.S. military. Wolfowitz replied, “There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at the invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government.”
That is akin to the sovereignty that the Soviets awarded Eastern European nations after World War II. U.S. government officials made it clear that they intend to maintain 14 permanent military bases in Iraq. “Do what we say and you won’t get hurt” will be the de facto meaning of sovereignty for Iraqis.
Bush apparently defined self-government for a foreign country as being under benevolent American domination. It is another case of Bush’s assuming that people are dumb enough to fall for a bogus label.
Many Iraqis have never recognized that the United States had sovereignty over them — as opposed to having enough force to suppress resistance. Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi derided Bush’s claims: “Sovereign power will be in the hands of the only military force in the country, which is the United States. It is ludicrous … to talk about a transfer of sovereignty.” University of Michigan professor Juan Cole commented that the sovereignty handover “was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush’s election campaign.”
As the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson noted, “It appears that the simple illusion of giving the Iraqi people ‘’their country back,’’ while still maintaining 138,000 troops there, was a master stroke. In May, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was worth going to war was at its lowest point, falling from a high of 76 percent during the war to 44 percent. A month later, just before the handover, the same poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was a mistake to go to send troops to Iraq was at its highest, 54 percent.”
False hopes over sovereignty
After Bush announced the sovereignty handover, the American media sharply curtailed its coverage of the Iraqi conflict. The media acted as if Bush’s de facto victory proclamation made the Iraq War old news and not worth as much coverage. They let the White House define reality — and thus people were supposed to move along. Americans paid more attention to Bush’s bragging about the “sovereignty hand-over” than to the rising number of dead U.S. soldiers. The average daily number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq rose sharply from June through September, as did the average number of U.S. military dead per month.
Sovereignty hoopla convinced millions of Americans that the Iraqi problem had been or would soon be solved. A survey done in the 10 days after the sovereignty handover showed that almost twice as many Americans believed that the new Iraq government had at least an equal share of power as believed that the U.S. military was still the supreme power in the country. The poll, by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, also found that “fifty percent of the respondents said they thought the number of United States troops in Iraq should be reduced to no more than ‘a few thousand’ in six months or less.” That was a peculiar belief, since neither Bush nor Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was hinting at any such withdrawal.
The “sovereignty transfer” also had a big impact because people expected similar results to what had happened after previous conflicts when the U.S. announced it was formally turning over the reins. CNN polling expert William Schneider concluded, “The handover of authority in Iraq at the end of June apparently had exactly the effect that the White House intended: It made Iraq seem like less of an American problem.”
Bush could not have won reelection without pervasive deceit over Iraq. A Washington Post analysis after the 2004 election noted that the Kerry campaign “gambled on building up the Massachusetts senator’s image in the belief that voters were familiar with Bush’s weaknesses and the turmoil in Iraq.” Professor Ira Chernus noted that one exit poll showed that “ninety percent of Bush voters said things are going well in Iraq.” In contrast, “Eighty-two percent of Kerry voters said things are going badly in Iraq.”
Bush re-subjugated Americans by claiming to have liberated Iraqis. Far more Americans recognize the futility of the U.S. attack on Iraq now than at the time of Bush’s reelection. But a cowardly media and a docile opposition party have permitted Bush to turn his folly into a long-term albatross around the necks of both Iraqis and Americans.
Saturday 27th September 2008
McCain’s Great Betrayal of Fellow POWs
7:42 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Lying | Comments: 17
In last night’s debate, McCain again strutted out the fact of his POW status during the Vietnam war.
A servile media has long allowed this to be the primary part of McCain’s halo.
But instead, it should raise questions that go to the heart of McCain’s willingness to betray his fellow soldiers and countrymen in pursuit of political profit.
Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer prize while risking his life covering Cambodia for the New York Times in the 1970s. The Nation just published a Schanberg expose that proves that McCain intentionally pulled strings to bury U.S. government information on American soldiers left behind in Vietnam. Upon returning from Vietnam, McCain “pulled himself up by his bootstraps” by burnishing Richard Nixon’s boots - and denying the existence of POWs left behind was Obligatory Lie #1.
Schanberg’s sources are 10-karat, if not better.
Here is the shorter version that appears in the October 6 version of Nation.
Here is the longer version that appears in a study at the Nation Institute webpage.
The media never cares enough about American soldiers to even ask McCain about his role in covering up info about American POWs left behind. But the press turns into his boot burnishers whenever he struts out his tale of suffering.
Friday 26th September 2008
Intro chapter from Feeling Your Pain (2000)
12:41 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 5
Here is the introduction chapter of Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, 2000).
This was my parting bouquet to the Clinton White House. The book went to three printings within the first month of its release but slowed down afterwards. (It did not contain any fresh Clinton rape allegations, so it failed to hold the attention of the media). It was a number one bestseller for Amazon in the state of Florida before the election, thanks in large part to a syndicated column that the Orlando Sentinel’s Charley Reese wrote about the book. Reese had a huge following in Florida and his hammering of the Clinton regime probably swayed far more voters than Bush’s final “official” margin of victory [sic] over Gore in the Sunshine state. Charley later became one of the most eloquent conservative critics of Bush’s abuses and foreign policy inanity. But his honesty may have cost him his job.
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FEELING YOUR PAIN by James Bovard
Introduction
The victory of William Jefferson Clinton in the 1992 presidential election was supposed to launch a new era in American politics. The Clinton-Gore team promised a “New Covenant” between government and the people that would propel government beyond its past failings. Clinton sought to make government strong enough to hoist and harangue the citizenry to higher ground, once and for all. And there was little to fear from expanding government power because, as Clinton promised, his would be “the most ethical administration in history.”
Yet, after nearly eight years of his rule, America is bedeviled by independent counsels crowding Washington streets, cynicism as far as the eye can see, and more hostility to government agencies across the board, from the Census Bureau to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The attempt to forcibly lift people left government in the gutter-at least in the minds of tens of millions of Americans.
From concocting new prerogatives to confiscate private property, to cham-pioning FBI agents’ right to shoot innocent Americans, to bankrolling the militarization of local police forces, the Clinton administration stretched the power of government on all fronts. From the soaring number of wiretaps, to converting cell phones into homing devices for law enforcement, to turning bankers into spies against their customers, free speech and privacy were undermined again and again. From dictating how many pairs of Chinese silk panties Americans could buy, to President Clinton’s heroic efforts to require trigger locks for all handguns in crack houses, no aspect of Americans’ lives was too arcane for federal intervention.
The Clinton administration built its “bridge to the twenty-first century” by filling every sinkhole along the way with taxpayer dollars. From AmeriCorps projects that beat the bushes to recruit new food stamp recipients, to a flood insurance program that multiplied flood damage, to programs to give the keys to lavish new single-family homes to public housing residents, the Clinton administration’s record domestic spending produced record fiascoes. For Clin-ton, the only wasted tax dollar was one that did not buy a vote, garner a campaign contribution, or provide a chance to bite his lip on national television.
In the same way that the success of NATO’s attack on Serbia was measured largely by continual proclamations of “record numbers” of sorties flown and “record numbers” of bombs dropped, so the Clinton administra-tion gauged its domestic policy successes by the number of new laws passed, new programs enacted, and new activities prohibited-by record fines levied and record prison sentences imposed. Federal agencies issued more than 25,000 new regulations-criminalizing everything from reliable toilets to snuff advertisements on race cars.
While the media focused primarily on the new benefits that Clinton promised, little attention was paid to the swelling tax burden on working Americans. Federal income tax revenue doubled between 1992 and 2000. The total tax burden on the average family with two earners rose three times faster than inflation. Though the IRS wrongfully seized hundreds of thousands of Americans’ paychecks and bank accounts during Clinton’s reign, almost all of the agency’s power survived unscathed.
Faith in the coercive power of the best and brightest permeated Clinton administration policymaking. More commands, more penalties, and more handouts were the recipe for progress. The Clinton administration consistently acted as if nothing is as dangerous as insufficient government power.
The history of the Clinton administration cannot be understood apart from the president’s personal view of government. Clinton portrayed government as the Lone Ranger-or, more accurately, millions of Lone Rangers, each with a sacred mission to rescue people whether they want to be rescued or not. For Clinton, government was never merely a bunch of clerks in some drab office vegetating toward a pension. Instead, government was “a champion of national purpose,” “the instrument of our national community,” and “a progressive instrument of the common good.” Clinton urged Americans in 1998 to commit themselves “to a new kind of government . . . to give all our people the tools to make the most of their own lives.” Clinton’s invocation of “government as tool-meister” ignored the abysmal record of federal job training, literacy, and other programs purportedly created to help people help themselves.
Many of Clinton’s policies can be explained only by his belief in his own moral superiority. For Clinton, the officially proclaimed intent of a specific government policy or action far transcended whatever force government agents use against citizens. And any protests about excessive force were met by appeals to “the rule of law”-regardless of whether the law was on the side of federal agents. The more people government brings to its knees, the fairer society becomes-simply because government power is the personification of fairness.
And the loftier the goal Clinton proclaimed, the more irrelevant private collateral damage became. One visionary foreign policy speech was more important than a thousand cluster bombs dropped on foreign civilians. Vigorous denunciations of international terrorism were more important than the cruise missiles that destroyed Sudan’s only pharmaceutical factory. Continual invoca-tions of “the children” at every political whistle-stop mattered more than the deaths of dozens of children after an FBI gas attack at Waco.
The Clinton recipe for public safety was: if politicians frighten enough of the people enough of the time, then everyone will be safe. Because Clinton felt government must constantly intervene in people’s lives, people had to be convinced that they are doomed unless politicians save them on a daily basis. The result: constant efforts to alarm the citizenry on everything from health care to speed limits, to secondhand smoke, to global warming, to garbage dumps, to radon, to guns.
Clinton owes much of his popularity to his “stealth statism.” Clinton was the master of intellectual shell games. In his 1996 State of the Union address, he announced “the era of Big Government is over.” Yet, once he had won reelection by campaigning as a moderate (or, in the words of presidential adviser Dick Morris, “campaigning as Pope”), he opened the floodgates. In his 1997 State of the Union address, Clinton called for a “national crusade for education standards” and federal standards and national credentials for all new teachers; announced plans “to build a citizen army of one million volunteer tutors to make sure every child can read independently by the end of the third grade”; called for $5 billion in federal aid to build and repair local schools, a new scholarship program to subsidize anyone going to college, a $10,000 tax deduction for all tuition payments after high school, and federal subsidies for private health insurance; demanded a new law entitling women who have had mastectomies to stay in the hospital 48 hours afterwards; advocated a constitutional amend-ment for “victims’ rights”; urged Congress to enact a law criminalizing any parent who crossed a state line allegedly to avoid paying child support; and proposed enacting juvenile crime legislation that “declares war on gangs,” hiring new prosecutors, and increasing federal spending on the war on drugs. Clinton also announced plans to expand NATO and declare “10 American Heritage Rivers” (thereby effectively prohibiting thousands of landowners from using their property along those rivers). Clinton, deeply concerned about American ethics, also demanded that “character education must be taught in our schools.” (This demand was not repeated in later State of the Union addresses.)
In his 1999 State of the Union address, Clinton proposed more than 40 new laws and programs. Citizens applauded proposals for more government regardless of how poorly existing government programs functioned and despite the fact that most Americans personally distrusted Clinton at the time he sought more power over them. In his 2000 State of the Union address, Clinton talked for almost an hour and a half and, according to one estimate, proposed the equivalent of $4 billion of new federal spending per minute.
This book focuses primarily on the Clinton administration’s domestic policies and programs. A chapter on the war against Serbia is included because that adventure vividly illustrates the Clinton administration’s moralism and arrogance. The Clinton presidency must not be judged solely on whether the Senate convicted him on impeachment charges, or whether he and his wife were shown to have obstructed justice during the Whitewater investigation, or whether a federal judge fined him for perjury, or whether a clear link is discovered between Chinese military front companies and Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. The danger of focusing narrowly on the best-known scandals is that people may forget or fail to realize how much misgovernment occurred during the 1990s.
Far more Americans have been affected by IRS depredations, HUD-ruined neighborhoods, and FDA-denied drugs than by Clinton’s personal misbehavior. Many of the worst abuses of the Clinton administration never appeared on the media’s radar screen. Instead, they were buried in Inspector General reports, General Accounting Office studies, or the proceedings of court cases followed by few.
The Clinton administration changed the political fabric of this nation and the political expectations of the American people and the American media. Clinton’s policies and rhetoric helped infantilize the American populace. The entire political system was subtely transformed year by year, crisis by crisis, hoax by hoax.
Clinton’s administration was far from unique in its contempt for constitu-tional or taxpayer rights. Most of the pernicious trends in federal policy started long before Clinton’s arrival in Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt was as voracious for power as was Clinton. Lyndon Johnson was more successful in passing sweeping laws to swell the federal government. The Bush administration was as feckless in its resolution to terminate failed government programs-and even President Ronald Reagan was far more tolerant of wasteful government spending than many of his fans recall.
The fact that the Clinton administration championed so many flawed programs and policies does not mean that good government would have resulted if the Republican Party held the White House. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for six of the eight years of Clinton’s administration. Most congressmen of both parties showed little understanding of, or curiosity about, how federal programs were functioning.
This is not an attempt to pass final judgment on the Clinton administration. Such an effort must await the unraveling of numerous cover-ups and the surfacing of further flaws in new programs and policies. Instead, it is an effort to present many details and key issues that must be part of a broad assessment of the impact of the Clinton administration on America.
Once a president leaves office, his record usually quickly blurs. All that is recalled are a few high points, a few catch phrases, and a few indictments. The rest is swept under the rug of failing memories and the spin-doctoring of supporters and detractors. Americans cannot understand the nation’s political course without recognizing the follies and fiascoes of the recent past, the constant expansion of government programs and power, and the resulting momentum for ever more coercion.
Thursday 25th September 2008
Intro chapter to ATTENTION DEFICIT DEMOCRACY (2006)
2:25 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 4
Here’s the introduction from Attention Deficit Democracy (2006).
This book may have struck more of a nerve with reviewers et al. if it had come out a year later. It was considered too cynical by many folks back in ‘06. Rather ironic, given subsequent American history….
For instance, Bush’s television address last night epitomized how the government now rules by exploiting fear. His bailout proposal would vest boundless power in the Secretary of the Treasury. And yet, the absolutism aspect is being treated as if it were an asterisk - instead of a profound threat to the Constitution.
ATTENTION DEFICIT DEMOCRACY by James Bovard
Introduction
Delusions about democracy are subverting peace and freedom. The American system of government is collapsing thanks to ignorant citizens, lying politicians, and a government leashed neither by law nor Constitution. While presidents and pundits harp on democracy’s inevitable spread around the world, it is perishing at home.
Victorious politicians routinely invoke the “will of the people” to sanctify their power. But voters cannot countenance what they do not understand. The “will of the people” is often simply a measure of how many people fell for which lies, how many people were frightened by which advertisements, and which red herrings worked on which target audiences. Rather than the “will of the people,” election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.
Many Americans have little or no idea how government works or who is holding the reins on their lives. The majority of American voters do not know the name of their congressman, the length of terms of House or Senate members, what the Bill of Rights guarantees, or what the government is actually doing in the vast majority of its interventions. A survey after the 2002 congressional election revealed that less than a third of Americans knew “that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election.” Recent polls show that almost two-thirds of Americans could not name a single Supreme Court justice and that 58 percent of Americans could not name a single cabinet department in the federal government.
Americans are assured that they are free because rulers take power only with the people’s informed consent. What does “informed consent” mean these days? It means knowing the names of the president’s pets but not knowing his record on key issues. It means knowing the sexual orientation of family members of candidates for high office, but falling prey to their rewriting of history. It means recalling the phrases the government endlessly repeats, and screening out evidence of government atrocities.
The political ignorance of scores of millions of Americans prevents them from recognizing the consequences or dangers of government actions. The citizenry is increasingly on automatic pilot, paying less attention to each new war, each new power grab, each new dubious presidential assertion.
The rising gullibility of the American people may be the most important trend in U.S. democracy. With each passing decade, with each new presidency, it takes less and less to snooker Americans. And a candidate only has to fool enough people on one day to snare power over everyone for four years.
Attention Deficit Democracy begets a government that is nominally democratic – in which elections are boisterous events accompanied by torrents of deceptive ads and mass rallies. But after the election, the president returns to his pedestal. Attention Deficit Democracy lacks the most important check on the abuse of power: an informed citizenry resolutely defending their rights and liberties.
In 1693, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, wrote what could be the motto for modern American government. “Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.” Rulers endlessly assure people that they are in charge – while creating agency after agency, program after program that people can neither comprehend nor control. Americans’ political thinking is becoming akin to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance – a series of bromides that sink into the mind and stifle independent, critical thought.
MONARCHICAL MYTHS OF DEMOCRACY
President George W. Bush calls democracy “the most honorable form of government ever devised by man.” Americans are taught that the sum of American democracy is vastly greater than its parts. Regardless of how often the candidate withholds information or how many false claims he emits, no matter how deluded the average voter, and no matter what manipulations occur before and during voting – election results are sacrosanct.
The same types of myths have grown up around democracy that long propped up monarchs. In the 1500s, peasants were encouraged to believe that the king was chosen by God to serve His purposes on Earth. Today, Americans are encouraged to believe that Bush’s reelection victory is a sign of God’s approval of Bush’s reign. In the 1600s, English yeomen were told that any limit on the King’s power was an affront to God. Today, Americans are told that any restraint on the president’s power thwarts the Will of the People. In the 1700s, the downtrodden of Europe were told that their king possessed the sum of all Earthly wisdom. Today, people are encouraged to believe that the president and his top cadre practically know all and see all – their insider information transcends the petty facts unearthed by the CIA, congressional committees, or the 9/11 Commission. In the early 1800s, people were encouraged to believe that their kings automatically cared about their subjects, simply because that was the nature of kings. Now, people are taught that the government automatically serves the people, simply because a plurality of voters assented to one of the politicians the major parties offered them.
As people became more literate and better informed, they lost their faith in monarchs. But new delusions have replaced old superstitions. Democracy multiplies the number of people with a vested interest in delusions about government. Americans are supposed to sit back, confident that voting cures all political evils – as if the process for selecting rulers vaccinated the political system from harm. People are told that as long as they can cast a ballot, they will be safe. In a democracy, people are led to believe that they can easily apply the brakes to government, no matter how unstoppable it becomes.
FABRICATING A RIGHT TO RULE
It is a common saying among political campaign consultants: “In victory, all sins are forgotten.” Unfortunately, the sooner citizens forget the lies of the campaign trail, the sooner they will be victimized by new government failures and sacrificed in more unnecessary wars.
Losing a certain percentage of the voters who understand issues or recall facts is now simply a “transaction cost” for a political campaign. The only lies that are unforgivable nowadays are those that repel more voters than they con. And regardless of how brazen a politician’s howlers, the media rushes to repaint him as worthy of respect and deference.
The biggest election frauds usually occur before the voting booths open. Bush is upholding a long tradition of presidential deceit. He was reelected in large part due to mass delusions about Iraq. An August 2004 poll found that “among those who wrongly believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, 81% think going to war was the right decision. Among those who correctly know that Iraq had no WMD, just 8% think the war was right.” Bush and Cheney successfully inoculated tens of millions of voters against reality, linking Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 and portraying the invasion of Iraq as a necessary part of the war on terrorism. A University of Maryland October 2004 poll analysis concluded, “It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him.”
For many voters in 2004, Bush’s presumed personal goodness was all that they needed to know. When Bush acted like he was incorrigible, many voters hailed his conduct as proof he was steadfast. When Bush refused to admit any mistakes, many voters assumed his record was impeccable. The more Bush boasted of his consistency, the less attention many Americans paid to reality. Bush “almost never entertains public doubt, which is part of the White House design to build a more powerful presidency,” the Washington Post reported. To breed blind faith in the ruler, people are encouraged to see the president as infallible. When Bush stumbled in the presidential debates, many supporters felt a bond with him as someone also not weighed down by excessive intellectual baggage. Floridian Lynn Farr, a 43-year-old former restaurant owner, explained his vote for Bush: “The guy wears a cowboy hat. He cuts brush. You always see [news] clips of him driving a big ol’ Ford truck and working on his ranch. He’s one of us.”
Bush has proven that a president can get away with far more hokum than previously thought. Unfortunately, this was also the lesson of the Clinton presidency. Even though Americans often recognized that Bill Clinton lied, many still believed him when he promised to “feel their pain.” Clinton’s case for bombing Serbia in 1999 was as dubious as Bush’s case for invading Iraq. But for both Clinton and Bush, their self-proclaimed good intentions made unjustified U.S. killings irrelevant.
“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so,” history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. From John F. Kennedy lying about the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba; to Johnson lying about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; to Richard Nixon lying about the secret bombing of Cambodia; to Jimmy Carter lying about the Shah of Iran being a progressive, enlightened ruler; to Ronald Reagan lying about terrorism and Iran-Contra; to George H. W. Bush lying about the justifications for the first Gulf War, entire generations have come of age since the ancient time when a president’s power was constrained by a duty of candor to the public.
Unfortunately, many citizens’ minds are sponges, soaking up whatever government emits. Lies almost always turn out to be duds, as far as detonating any backlash against political abuses. Self-government is vanishing because of black holes in citizens’ heads where connections are not made and sparks do not fly.
Ironically, despite the government’s long record of deceits, distrust of government is more dangerous than government power itself – at least according to the conventional wisdom of today’s Establishment. Private doubts are supposedly a greater threat to America than official lies. Trust in government becomes mass Prozac, keeping people docile and compliant.
BATTERED CITIZEN SYNDROME
The government is exploiting public dread to redefine the relation between rulers and the American people. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, in a talk to Republican National Convention delegates in September 2004, praised Bush’s role as the protector of the nation and assured them that “this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.” Card’s comment generated almost no controversy. Yet viewing Americans as young children needing protection makes a mockery of democracy. Is servility now the price of survival?
The more ignorant the populace, the easier it becomes for rulers to frighten people into submission. Bush was reelected in part because his administration, policies, and statements, helped by many dubious alerts and warnings, boosted the number of Americans who feared a terrorist attack during 2004. Each time the feds issued a new warning of a terrorist threat after 9/11, the president’s approval rating rose by an average of almost 3 percent.
As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. Politicians cow people on election day to corral them afterward. The more that fear is the key issue, the more that voters will be seeking a savior, not a representative – and the more the winner can claim all the power he claims to need.
We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers. Like a train engineer bonding with the survivors of a train wreck that happened on his watch, Bush constantly reminded Americans of 9/11 and his wars. The greater the government’s failure to protect, the greater the subsequent mass fear – and the easier it becomes to subjugate the populace. The continuing follies and flounders of the war on terrorism were irrelevant compared to the paramount promise of protection. The craving for a protector drops an Iron Curtain around the mind, preventing a person from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket.
In recent years, Americans have devoted far more effort to spreading democracy than to understanding it. Bush, echoing Clinton and earlier presidents, says that America is “called” to spread democracy and freedom around the world. Forgetting the warnings by early presidents about the dangers of foreign entanglements, the U.S. government is charging forward to remake the world in its own image.
Americans have been taught to view U.S. intervention abroad as the equivalent of a holy man touching a sick person, instantly healing whatever ails them. Even if the person isn’t sick, getting a holy nudge can’t but help them. “Fixing” elections is doing a service to foreign peoples since the U.S. government knows what is best for them. And if foreigners object to U.S. interference, that just proves that they are deluded and must be protected from themselves.
In his second inaugural address, Bush issued a revolutionary challenge to every government in the world: “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” Bush is correct that freedom is “eternally right.” But that does not confer upon Bush or other U.S. presidents the right to act like the World Pope of Democracy, entitled to appoint rulers in each nation upon Earth. The notion of American uniqueness has gone from a point of pride to a pretext for aggression.
ELECTIVE DICTATORSHIP
President George Washington declared in 1790 that “the virtues and knowledge of the people would effectually oppose the introduction of tyranny.” But today’s Americans do little to justify the confidence of the nation’s first president. The federal government has been rapidly adding new coercive penalties to its statutory arsenal for decades. Americans have acquiesced to politicians and bureaucrats taking over one area of their lives after another.
President Washington may have also been confident that his fellow citizens and their offspring would not forget his warning that “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force.” Unfortunately, as long as recent American presidents continue to praise freedom, they are usually permitted to seize as much power as they please. On November 13, 2001, Bush announced that he had the right to nullify all rights. Bush decreed that he had the power to label as an “enemy combatant” anyone suspected of involvement with terrorism. The president need provide no evidence for such designations; there would be no access to courts to challenge such a label; and people could be detained forever on the president’s accusation. And “enemy combatants” need not be combatants. Bush administration lawyers have made clear that even hapless donors to foreign charities can be seized and held without charges if their contribution ends up in the wrong hands. In July 2005, Bush’s solicitor general announced in federal court that the entire United States is a “battlefield” upon which Bush has absolute power to have people – including American citizens – seized and detained indefinitely.
In 2002, Bush’s top legal advisors informed him that, as commander-in-chief during wartime, he was above all the laws Congress enacted. Bush’s legal whiz kids also redefined torture so that CIA agents and U.S. soldiers could brutalize detainees without fear of prosecution. Americans were assured that the Abu Ghraib photos that leaked out in 2004 were the result of “a few bad apples.” However, details later emerged that CIA operatives or U.S. soldiers had killed dozens of detainees during interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reviving a hallowed tradition from the Middle Ages, the administration announced that it could use “evidence” gained from torture to prosecute detainees in its military tribunals. Americans’ scant response to the torture scandal signaled their growing tolerance for absolute power – as long as the president promised it would be used to make them secure.
This is the age of Leviathan Democracy. Leviathan was the Biblical term that English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used in 1651 to describe a government absolute and far superior to its subjects, whose task was to obey and, when ordered, die. The United States was an anti-Leviathan at its founding – the first government to be created with strict limitations on its power enshrined into the Constitution to protect citizens from their rulers in perpetuity.
But in recent decades, government power has become unbounded. The U.S. government still has the formal trappings of a democracy – candidates, elections, congressional proceedings, judges draped in long black robes. But we have fallen far from the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a Rule of Law. Today, when the president’s desires extend beyond legal boundaries, the Constitution and the statute book be damned.
Attention Deficit Democracy begets Leviathan because rulers exploit people’s ignorance to seize more power over them. The bigger government becomes, the fewer citizens understand it, the less representative it will tend to be. The contract between rulers and ruled is replaced by a blank check. As long as presidents and their appointees recite the proper phrases and strike the correct poses, they can do as they please.
Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people. Yet citizens are assured that their government will protect liberty, no matter what. Democracy automatically reins itself in so that it does not gorge on power like a horse eating too many oats, stopping only when it explodes.
Government is an elective dictatorship when voters do little more than select who will violate the laws and Constitution. Bush, like other U.S. presidents, perpetually equates democracy with freedom. But if the purported consent of voters confers upon the winner the right to nullify citizens’ rights – they are voting for a master, not a representative. Elections become little more than reverse slave auctions, in which slaves choose their masters.
Voting is now a way of conferring power and honors on politicians, rather than a method of reining in rulers. In the early American Republic, candidates would stress their fidelity to the Constitution. But the Constitution has vanished from the campaign trail, replaced by competing promises of new handouts and new protections against the vicissitudes of daily life.
The Founding Fathers did not design a “Great Leader” democracy. The ultimate principle of the American system of government is strict limits on the power of all branches of the federal government. Yet Bush, like earlier presidents, has swayed many people to view checks and balances as a peril to their personal survival.
Attention Deficit Democracy lulls citizens into thinking that they have nothing to fear from the rising number of sticks and shackles that politicians and bureaucrats can use on them. The peril of rising U.S. government power is stark to foreigners, who see U.S. aggression around the globe. It is stark to many people who hear the president talk of military killings as “bringing justice” to the deceased. It is stark to those who fear the United States may invade their country next. But it is not stark to too many Americans.
THE COMING END OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?
The more authoritarian the U.S. government becomes, the louder presidents praise democracy. Unfortunately, democracy is a magical word that permits speakers to automatically fog the minds of many listeners.
By what standard could American democracy be considered a success? Simply because referendums on rulers occur without widespread violence? Because most Americans acquiesce to whomever the political system ordains as the winner? Because the majority of people continue obeying, and paying taxes? Simply because there have not been Albanian-style mass violent attacks on government office buildings?
Bogus fears can produce real servitude. Politicians stampede people with one dubious terror attack warning after another; one constitutional right after another is decimated; one barrier against absolutism after another is breached.
Is our era coming to resemble medieval times, when people were so suffused with fear that they formally signed away their rights and pledged fealty to whoever promised to protect them? There is scant glory or dignity in panicky national referendums to choose a Shepherd-in-Chief.
Are Americans free simply because they are permitted a perfunctory choice on who will molest their rights and liberties? How much of a facade of democracy is necessary to placate the public? Is it the “will of the people” – or at least the majority – to be deluded? Does self-government now mean anything more than showing up once every few years to ratify one’s rulers? Is the sole question remaining in American politics – how to find a good master for the American people?
It is naive to trust to the ignorant preferences of frightened people to preserve freedom. In America today, all leaders have to do is brazenly deny obvious facts and they become entitled to commit new abuses. Bush has demonstrated how easily tens of millions of people can be conned into contented subjugation and marching lockstep behind a president whose falsehoods have already left thousan