With this as background, let’s go on to take a look at the 2008 election.
The Campaign by Bush’s Successors
McCain and Obama in their campaigns have done all they can to distance themselves from Bush and Cheney rhetorically. But neither candidate filibustered any of the bills that legalized torture, abrogated habeas corpus, authorized and funded unjust wars, granted retroactive immunity for felonious, massive spying on Americans, gave the White House unfettered, patently unconstitutional, emergency powers, including the power on the president’s say-so alone to declare martial law and use military force on American soil to quell any “emergency,” as declared and defined unilaterally by the president.
Both McCain and Obama have steadfastly refused to put a stop to any of this in their capacities as U.S. Senators, even though it has been their explicit legal and moral responsibility to do so. In 2005, for example, when McCain sponsored the Anti-Torture Amendment and Bush, forced to sign it, appended a signing statement, one of the over 750 signing statements that Bush has used, to say that he would ignore the Act. McCain said and did nothing. Obama declined to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that legalized torture and eliminated habeas corpus rights for people labeled “unlawful enemy combatants,” and when voting against it, objected to it not on the grounds that it was barbaric and unthinkable, but because it was “dumb.”
This same cowardice in the face of tyranny is belied by the candidates’ bravery - or gall - to ask that we hand over power to them despite their adroitly avoiding doing anything that would block or reverse any of Bush and Cheney’s brazen and grotesque transgressions.
If a member of a group of rapists, while participating in a gang rape, were to say to a horrified female bystander, “If you support me becoming the gang leader I promise that no more gang rapes will happen under my leadership,” what would our bystander think? Would she not be stunned by her interrogator’s moxie? Would she not scream back in his face: “How dare you! Stop the raping now!”
Yet millions and millions of bystanders have not been seeing this rape of our country, of our people, of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and of the planet itself, as a rape. They have been seeing it as something else.
Hoodwinking
Besides hoods, then, I cannot also help but think of hoodwinking and the 2008 elections.
Hoods and hoodwinking: two words that form an appropriate pair, like two bookends. If people were books, bookends are needed to keep the people in line. Without the hoodwinking, hoods would not work. Without the hoods, the hoodwinking would be insufficient.
Which is worse? The hoods? Or the to date successful hoodwinking?
Bush and Cheney’s would-be successors would not be credible to even the most ill informed American voter if Obama and McCain didn’t declare themselves “reformers” and “change agents,” at odds with Bush and Cheney.
In every election cycle candidates promise some kind of change. But this time the degree of necessary distancing by both parties’ nominees from the incumbent far surpasses previous contests. A further indication of this difference is the fact that – for the first time in history - America will have a black president – a black president – if the votes are actually counted. Obama’s nomination would not have been possible had the desire for change not been so pronounced.
At the same time, both candidates must sustain a precarious tightrope act of voting for measures that protect and advance the Bush agenda while seeking to persuade people to vote for them on the basis of a future promise of change, a change in which, apparently, the winner will stop doing what they’ve been doing all along and suddenly start doing something very different.
The degree of antipathy for the Bush regime, the possibilities for something more than mere rhetoric to come from this period, and the sharp limitations to this electoral game, all stand out in relief.
On the one hand, the American electorate knows in its bones that Bush and Cheney are trouble, like the malevolent creatures that pursued Frodo in the Lord of the Rings on dark horseback, their thunderous hooves reverberating through the night.
On the other hand, the hoodwinking by the major parties is pervasive – the belief and hope, no matter how forlorn, that simply punching a touch screen will put this sordid and obscene eight years to rest is … foolish, naïve, woefully inadequate, and ultimately immoral.
How could infamous atrocities and a veritable host of malignant deeds such as the mass murder of more than a million, two hundred thousand people in Iraq, egregious abandonment in New Orleans and its people in the face of Katrina, mass surveillance in felonious violation of the 1978 FISA law, brazen and unchallenged declarations by the White House that it is unaccountable to Congress, to international law, to the Constitution or to anyone at all, and on and on, be made right by what individuals do behind a closed space in a polling station for a few moments on one day in November 2008?
If casting a vote for some new president could install into office the most compassionate, most principled, most powerful individual in history who was determined to right the wrongs, no matter what the personal cost – need it be said that such a person wasn’t a nominee of any party - how could this knight in shining armor sweep his sword and single-handedly undo these monstrous things?
This knight on horseback who has stood by all these years while Guinevere has been repeatedly raped, the peasants’ villages and fields looted and burned, the treasury sacked, the troops off fighting foreign wars, committing daily atrocities upon the direct orders of their superiors, bogged down in occupations that are only enflaming the populace of those distant lands, is suddenly going to restore the honor that he has allowed to be debased for every single day of the last eight years? Why, because he finally recognizes that it’s the right thing to do? We should stake our lives, this country’s and the world’s fate, on a slender reed of desperate hope that they will have an epiphany upon becoming the new Commander in Chief of the most powerful imperialist empire in history?
How could the dramatic abdication of legal and moral responsibility by the Democratic Party and the mass media in the face of the tyranny of George and Richard for all these years not require the sustained civil resistance of millions of people to change the terms and alter the balance of forces?
How could the existing balance of forces that have spectacularly given Bush and Cheney free rein for all - and even more - than they have demanded, be left intact and yet result, after January 20, 2009, in a prosecution and repudiation of the horrid things that Bush and Cheney and a co-operative and collusive Congress have done collectively?
What fools we would be to believe in such a thing!
But foolishness of this kind, wishful thinking based on nothing more than wistfulness for a romanticized bygone country and government, are everywhere to be seen. If you ask people who have been following what’s been going on in the last eight years about the fate of the nation, what you hear from them is both a deep anger or at least dismay about the Bush years and from far too many, a completely unrealistic anticipation of “change” courtesy of the very national leaders who have been part of the problem themselves. How can leaders claiming the mantle of moral leadership do so when as leaders in the Senate they have countenanced torturers and war criminals?
This betrayal of morality and the rule of law is of world-historic proportions.
From it flow two ineluctable facts.
First, any future president and vice-president could do not only precisely what George and Richard have done, but go even further. What does going even further entail? The very thought is alarming, for what they have already done is incredible. This precedent setting, this poisoned legacy - this demonstration that they could “push and push and push” (as Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington has said) and no “larger force” would stop them - is the essence, and the most important element, of the Bush legacy.
The Campaign by Bush’s Successors
McCain and Obama in their campaigns have done all they can to distance themselves from Bush and Cheney rhetorically. But neither candidate filibustered any of the bills that legalized torture, abrogated habeas corpus, authorized and funded unjust wars, granted retroactive immunity for felonious, massive spying on Americans, gave the White House unfettered, patently unconstitutional, emergency powers, including the power on the president’s say-so alone to declare martial law and use military force on American soil to quell any “emergency,” as declared and defined unilaterally by the president.
Both McCain and Obama have steadfastly refused to put a stop to any of this in their capacities as U.S. Senators, even though it has been their explicit legal and moral responsibility to do so. In 2005, for example, when McCain sponsored the Anti-Torture Amendment and Bush, forced to sign it, appended a signing statement, one of the over 750 signing statements that Bush has used, to say that he would ignore the Act. McCain said and did nothing. Obama declined to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that legalized torture and eliminated habeas corpus rights for people labeled “unlawful enemy combatants,” and when voting against it, objected to it not on the grounds that it was barbaric and unthinkable, but because it was “dumb.”
If a member of a group of rapists, while participating in a gang rape, were to say to a horrified female bystander, “If you support me becoming the gang leader I promise that no more gang rapes will happen under my leadership,” what would our bystander think? Would she not be stunned by her interrogator’s moxie? Would she not scream back in his face: “How dare you! Stop the raping now!”
Yet millions and millions of bystanders have not been seeing this rape of our country, of our people, of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and of the planet itself, as a rape. They have been seeing it as something else.
Hoodwinking
Besides hoods, then, I cannot also help but think of hoodwinking and the 2008 elections.
Hoods and hoodwinking: two words that form an appropriate pair, like two bookends. If people were books, bookends are needed to keep the people in line. Without the hoodwinking, hoods would not work. Without the hoods, the hoodwinking would be insufficient.
Which is worse? The hoods? Or the to date successful hoodwinking?
Bush and Cheney’s would-be successors would not be credible to even the most ill informed American voter if Obama and McCain didn’t declare themselves “reformers” and “change agents,” at odds with Bush and Cheney.
In every election cycle candidates promise some kind of change. But this time the degree of necessary distancing by both parties’ nominees from the incumbent far surpasses previous contests. A further indication of this difference is the fact that – for the first time in history - America will have a black president – a black president – if the votes are actually counted. Obama’s nomination would not have been possible had the desire for change not been so pronounced.
At the same time, both candidates must sustain a precarious tightrope act of voting for measures that protect and advance the Bush agenda while seeking to persuade people to vote for them on the basis of a future promise of change, a change in which, apparently, the winner will stop doing what they’ve been doing all along and suddenly start doing something very different.
The degree of antipathy for the Bush regime, the possibilities for something more than mere rhetoric to come from this period, and the sharp limitations to this electoral game, all stand out in relief.
On the one hand, the American electorate knows in its bones that Bush and Cheney are trouble, like the malevolent creatures that pursued Frodo in the Lord of the Rings on dark horseback, their thunderous hooves reverberating through the night.
On the other hand, the hoodwinking by the major parties is pervasive – the belief and hope, no matter how forlorn, that simply punching a touch screen will put this sordid and obscene eight years to rest is … foolish, naïve, woefully inadequate, and ultimately immoral.
How could infamous atrocities and a veritable host of malignant deeds such as the mass murder of more than a million, two hundred thousand people in Iraq, egregious abandonment in New Orleans and its people in the face of Katrina, mass surveillance in felonious violation of the 1978 FISA law, brazen and unchallenged declarations by the White House that it is unaccountable to Congress, to international law, to the Constitution or to anyone at all, and on and on, be made right by what individuals do behind a closed space in a polling station for a few moments on one day in November 2008?
If casting a vote for some new president could install into office the most compassionate, most principled, most powerful individual in history who was determined to right the wrongs, no matter what the personal cost – need it be said that such a person wasn’t a nominee of any party - how could this knight in shining armor sweep his sword and single-handedly undo these monstrous things?
This knight on horseback who has stood by all these years while Guinevere has been repeatedly raped, the peasants’ villages and fields looted and burned, the treasury sacked, the troops off fighting foreign wars, committing daily atrocities upon the direct orders of their superiors, bogged down in occupations that are only enflaming the populace of those distant lands, is suddenly going to restore the honor that he has allowed to be debased for every single day of the last eight years? Why, because he finally recognizes that it’s the right thing to do? We should stake our lives, this country’s and the world’s fate, on a slender reed of desperate hope that they will have an epiphany upon becoming the new Commander in Chief of the most powerful imperialist empire in history?
How could the dramatic abdication of legal and moral responsibility by the Democratic Party and the mass media in the face of the tyranny of George and Richard for all these years not require the sustained civil resistance of millions of people to change the terms and alter the balance of forces?
How could the existing balance of forces that have spectacularly given Bush and Cheney free rein for all - and even more - than they have demanded, be left intact and yet result, after January 20, 2009, in a prosecution and repudiation of the horrid things that Bush and Cheney and a co-operative and collusive Congress have done collectively?
What fools we would be to believe in such a thing!
But foolishness of this kind, wishful thinking based on nothing more than wistfulness for a romanticized bygone country and government, are everywhere to be seen. If you ask people who have been following what’s been going on in the last eight years about the fate of the nation, what you hear from them is both a deep anger or at least dismay about the Bush years and from far too many, a completely unrealistic anticipation of “change” courtesy of the very national leaders who have been part of the problem themselves. How can leaders claiming the mantle of moral leadership do so when as leaders in the Senate they have countenanced torturers and war criminals?
This betrayal of morality and the rule of law is of world-historic proportions.
From it flow two ineluctable facts.
First, any future president and vice-president could do not only precisely what George and Richard have done, but go even further. What does going even further entail? The very thought is alarming, for what they have already done is incredible. This precedent setting, this poisoned legacy - this demonstration that they could “push and push and push” (as Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington has said) and no “larger force” would stop them - is the essence, and the most important element, of the Bush legacy.
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