The Paxton Pundit - by Stacey Youdin

The Unrelenting Grind
"Thank you for contacting me to express your support of
legislation that would extend habeas corpus to foreign terrorists."
Stevan Pearce 10/24/07

On whose say-so is a person a foreign terrorist? Has someone like the infamous Curveball, the Ratso of pre-war intelligence, been the last word on whom to round up?

As Musharraf manipulates realities in Pakistan, one hears some of the same sloganeering we heard Mr. Bush's team use to justify previously un-American means with fundamentally American sounding ends like freedom and liberty.

The Supreme Court was dissolved for the offense of judicial activism. (Theirs, not ours. Relax, Chester.)

The script is drawn straight from Costa Gravas. Musharraf perceived a cancer on the nation and proceeded to lock everybody up who might suggest it was he who was using threats of terror to turn government on its head, suspend the constitution and overstay his welcome. (I did several double takes tuning in to a news report several sentences in, until realizing it was Musharraf, not Bush, to whom the pronouns referred.)

On balance, it looks like the principal neo-con export to the region has been authoritarianism.

Whether tightening the grip of area mullahs, ayatollahs, princes or so-called presidents was the intended consequence or not, the administration's framing of the post-9/11 world has been its central cause.

If justice for the thousands deceased were paramount, some new era in international cooperation would have been the mantra. Instead, in their names, our war of choice reeks of gangster vengeance.

Evidently, the current definition of success in Iraq is having convinced, for the time being, sundry thugs that we're prepared to be even greater ones.

It's a new twist, but with roots more in Cold War realpolitik than a battle for hearts and minds or whatever was the previous hooey.

Musharraf made everybody's list of omitted members of the axis of evil. Dealing with this era's version of the Shah should have been better informed by history. He should have had five to ten days, no later than to the end of the month, to hand over any and all evil-doers. Especially the al Qaeda in his secret police.

This past week's mumbo-jumbo recapitulates in living color what doomed the neo-con rhetoric just months in to a war of no return.

As love is the cook's secret ingredient, being in the right prepares a nation correctly for war.

Bush lost me with his doctrine.

It could have been written by, sorry to say, a mugger. To say it has reduced our foreign policy to the level of tantrums by a spoiled child leaves Dick Cheney too much out of the equation. He has added palpable autocracy, to the point it leaves one wondering if he has made euphemism of the word "president." (He, Cheney, not Musharraf.)

This week we focused on retroactive immunity for some of the telecoms.

"Excuse you for what?"

"I burped."

But this isn't "It's a Wonderful Life." Far from it, unless you mean the director's cut where Clarence fails.

Immunity from prosecution for acceding to data mining, without a warrant, on the government's say-so. Gee, that was wrong?

We should be as alert to the trappings of the unrelenting grind of White House propaganda as we are sick and tired of same. That founding document, which if constructed strictly reverses the advance of mankind, is also the inconvenient obstacle which produces more and more inventive workarounds. Extraordinary workarounds!

Extraordinary workarounds, if not "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Next week: Clever

RETURN

http://users.wildblue.net/msyoudin/paxtpund.html