The Invisible Library

So. Everyone’s favorite hobbit/senator, Denis Kucinich has brought 35 articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. While on a righteous emotional level, I couldn’t be more thrilled, in the real world where these things have ramifications and exert pressure in numerous unforeseen and unforeseeable ways, it couldn’t matter less.

Don’t misunderstand: I applaud Kucinich. The man spent five hours reading a laundry list of reasons, all of them good and solid, for why George W. should not just be impeached but hauled off to the Hague for a war crimes trial and maybe even tried for treason. But– and this is the real point– none of these things are going to happen. So yeah, great. There’s a record for historians to look at showing that in 2008, at least one Democrat did in fact have a spine and sense of honor and integrity and justice and the wherewithal to do everything within his power to bring such lofty ambitions to fruition. But as John Scalzi pointed out, so what? The extent of Kucinich’s influence might be great and awe inspiring in Ohio but in the rest of the world, he’s a wacky old hippie who resembles an extra from Lord of the Rings, a Presidential also-ran with a hot wife and a sixth sense about UFOs. Kucinich can’t do anything more than speak this list of crimes into the public record. There is zero chance of anything coming from it. And as much as I’d like to see that petulant little twerp, George W. Bush, writhe under the spotlight of a senate trial for high crimes against the people of the United States, spending his last few months in office trying to convince the country and the whole world why we shouldn’t revile his name, shun his descendants to the seventh generation and salt the earth around his eventual grave, it ain’t gonna happen. Even Obama says so.*

There’s a threshold that a person crosses. It’s mostly invisible but once a person crosses it, they know with utter confidence that they have achieved enough power that no matter how bad they screw up, they won’t be held accountable. The reason is simple: to hold such a powerful person accountable for their wrongdoing would lay the blame on everyone below them and tangentially related to putting them in that position where they not only had the power to make such horrid choices but to have others execute them. Impeaching Bush wouldn’t just remove him form office.** It would show that any number of other powerful people were complicit in every single nefarious act, from holding hands with Saudi Princes to shitting all over New Orleans and fucking Iraq for generations. The Republican party helped him do it and the Democrats let him do it. And those facts would be dragged into the spot light, one by one, like so many stained blue dresses for the American people to see once and for all that we are ruled by a mob not of Legitimate Businessmen of Italian decent, but of venal old men with unsavory tastes and repulsive attachments to power for its own sake.

Ten points for style but minus a million for execution.

_________
* Not even in office yet and he’s already disappointing us. Oh well, get used to it.
** And leave Dick “I fuck goats for fun and sport” Chaney in his place, a truly terrifying proposition. He’d be sworn in to office on his personal copy of the Necronomicon, the one bound in the skin of Iraqi children, with a built in Nuclear strike button on the cover.

Sorry but Impeachment for illegal wars started by bad or negligent Intel has a minimum lie requirement of 1000. Lieing about blowjobs? One will do nicely, thanks. If only he had lied 65 more times, then maybe we could do something about it but since George W. Bush and his gang only told 935 lies that led us into war, it doesn’t really count. Missed that magic threshold by this much (holds thumb and finger just barely apart).

BBC:

The UK prime minister is forming a new partnership with other developed countries to make sure international aid is spent effectively.

Ministers from Burundi, Nepal, Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Cambodia will take part in the launch. […] Mr Brown said: “There is no greater cause than that every man, woman and child in the world should be able to benefit from the best medicine and healthcare.

“And our vision today is that we can triumph over ancient scourges and for the first time in history, conquer polio, TB, measles, and then with further advances and initiatives, go on to address pneumoccal pneumonia, malaria and eventually, HIV/AIDS.

“Today we come together - donor governments, health agencies and developing countries - with the certainty that we have the knowledge and the power to save millions of lives through our efforts.”

Maybe after Bush and his cronies demolish the country enough for us to qualify for third-world status we’ll finally be able to get Universal Health care here.

Johann Hari boarded the National Review cruise to see what Neocons say when they think no one else is listening:

Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise - drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it.

It’s like a cruise through an alternate reality, where Muslim Hoards are devouring Europe, the founding fathers fought a revolution to escape the tyranny of a king so they could establish a firm and resolute Executive President and we’re not only winning in Iraq but mystically redeeming our loss in Vietnam (due not to the Vietcong but to Liberal Commie appeasement, naturally) and everyone wets themselves in anticipation of bombs falling on Iran. Oh, and a black man thinks the KKK are just upset because they don’t have all the benefits that minorities have.

To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the UN building,” the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think - it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.”

Link via at Boing Boing.

I wasn’t going to post about Scooter and his get out of jail free card but well, damn it, I’m pissed off. No, seriously. I know you can’t tell by my lack of punctuation but there are just not enough capitol letters available on my current keyboard to emphasize how angry I am that this traitorous fucker gets to walk. Wordpress and the Internet does not support thousand point fonts. I suppose I could hop in my crop duster and write “GO TO HELL, SCOOTER” across the sky but it would still only express a fraction of the disgust and contempt I have for Libby, The President* and our governmental system as a whole. Perhaps a laser capable of sawing ten mile wide letters in the moon. Maybe that would express it. Or a gravity pump capable of moving stars, so I can spell out my disgust across the cosmos, so that future generations and civilizations eons hence will know how feverishly displeased I am that this slimy little pig fucker can put on the Benedict Arnold Hat and walk away like it was just some rude e-mail he accidentally sent to everyone in the office instead of just his equally degenerate buddy down the hall.

Many other people have added their piss to the wind but John Rogers wins the Internets for nailing the reason this despicable behavior was no real surprise:

Our representatives — and to a great degree we as a culture — are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying “You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way.”

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that –no we’d be admitting It Went Wrong.

And that’s the country we now live in. It’s not that the Cheney gang was so stupid that they never thought they’d get caught. It’s just that they didn’t care. They realized they could exploit the system and come out on top because that system is based on human decency and the innate Homo Sapien pack contract that if you fuck up, you slink away for a bit until you’re forgiven, then work your way back up the ladder. But you can short circuit that, so long as you smother that part of your heart that feels shame and self respect. Once you’ve killed the fear, you can do anything, so long as you don’t blink.

_________

*And by President I mean Cheney. I’m still not entirely sure George W. understands half the shit that comes out of his mouth. All he knows is that he gets fifteen minutes on the X-Box every time he makes it through a whole speech without mispronouncing more than three words in a row. I’ve heard a lot of people lately wonder out loud, “how does that poor bastard live with himself knowing what he has done?” You’re assuming A) he knows what he’s done and B) that he cares. Sociopaths have no empathy. Other people’s feelings are as alien to him as they are to any Doctor Who villain. A Dalek cannot feel sorry, because feeling is something only tangentially related to his experience. He was the one who chose to shed his skin and live inside a can and make “EXTERMINATE!” a way of life, not just a catchy thing to say on a Saturday night. If you can’t see the beauty of that lifestyle, well, you’re just some emotional alien with two bleeding hearts and a sense of justice and self control.

An update on yesterday’s post: it looks like Bush’s bid for Kingly privileges with the Constitution will not pass.

By lopsided bipartisan majorities, the House passed bills March 14 to reverse an executive order issued by President Bush allowing presidents to withhold their records from the public and to require donors to presidential libraries to identify themselves.

The Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 (H.R. 1255) would rescind an executive order issued by President Bush in 2001 allowing incumbent or former presidents to prevent the release of their presidential papers. At that time, critics said the order reversed the premise of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which called for the release of presidential papers 12 years after a president leaves office.

The White House issued a statement saying that the bill was “misguided, and would improperly impinge on the President’s constitutional authority, in violation of settled separation of powers principles,” the Washington Post reported March 14.

He’s threatening to veto the new bill, which will reascend his executive order but he’s only used that once, to discard frozen embryos that would otherwise go to good scientific research, and given his problems with Gonzales and the  Capitol Hill Eight, it looks like he’ll have other things on his mind, like ensuring that he has a legacy to whitewash.

Not content with bending the constitution over the Lincoln Bedroom divan and having his way with it fortnightly, The Boy Who Would Be King has decided that not only does he get to decide who reads his papers, but so will his children and grand children:

As professors at Southern Methodist University have mobilized against the plans to build President Bush’s library there, their focus has not been the library, but a policy institute to be affiliated with it that would have as its mission promoting the Bush philosophy.

Such an institute, with an explicitly ideological identity and reporting to the president’s foundation instead of to the university, runs counter to academic values, the critics have said. Many times they have attempted to contrast their dislike of the institute with the library itself, which could be a valuable source of documents on the Bush administration — open to scholars with a range of views. And SMU officials, in defending the library plans, have stressed the scholarly value of the archive.

But with opposition to the SMU plans growing, national groups of archivists and historians are trying to broaden the debate. Weeks after 9/11, President Bush signed an executive order giving presidents and former presidents much more control over their records — and extended that right to a family member when a former president dies. While there have been periodic disputes over how much control presidents should have over their papers, the Bush order goes beyond the control asserted by any president since Nixon (whose efforts to control his papers led to various laws to promote access).

Basically, what this provision means is that not only can GW keep Reagan’s paper’s locked up and out of the reach of researchers for longer than the usual 12 years but he’ll be able to look up his own papers, and his daddy’s, for however long he wants– even after he’s dead. He can grant his children and descendants the power of sole ownership, meaning that if you want to view his paper’s fifty years from now, you’d have to buy Jenna and Barb a drink and even then, maybe they’ll let you.

W keeps saying that no one can judge him now, that only history can do that. What he isn’t saying is that he’s going to do everything in his power to ensure that the only history involving him that you get to read is written by his loyal true believers. No one bothered to teach hi the difference between hagiography and history, but then, he’s always held the view that their was one set of rules for him and different, more stringent rules for those not chosen by Jesus, God and the Easter Bunny, that is, everyone else.

Anyone who doesn’t think we’re sliding into some nascent American version of fascism needs to read this. Everyone else who has noticed needs to read it as well. From the Fort Worth Weekly:

The war on terror, coupled with budget deficits, seems to have morphed into a war on information.

“This administration is trying to keep information from the U.S. citizens,” said Monika Antonelli, a UNT librarian who monitors attempts to restrict government information. “When I worked in government documents at UNT, the cost of the program was [about] 20 cents per taxpayer, and it was money well spent. The Depository Library program received less funding than the budget for military bands. This is not about saving money but about stifling information.”

The latest skirmish erupted last month when Russell, at a meeting of the American Library Association in Boston, announced the federal government’s 2006 budget would include money for only “50 essential titles” for the nation’s 1,250 depository libraries. Hundreds of other documents that the government for years had deposited in the nation’s libraries would no longer be available except online.

The ALA and the American Association of Law Libraries said the proposal would “eliminate almost all” of the printed material traditionally made available to libraries. The law librarians further complained that the plan “represents a major disruption to the [Federal Depository Library Program’s] role of ensuring no-fee, permanent access to government information for the American public.”

[…] Others are worried that shifting the responsibility for archiving government documents from public libraries to the government itself will make political editing of information too tempting. Librarian watchdogs have already noted that at least one agency, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, appears to have deleted some documents critical of the Bush administration from its web site.

“What happens when the Bush administration wants to prevent a particular policy point of view” from being aired? asked Arlene Weible, head of UNT’s government documents department. Shifting control of information from the libraries to the government leaves the public “with less of a check” against government abuses.

[…] But the shelves of the nation’s libraries are only one front on the government war on information. Increasingly, the government is thwarting requests for public information under the Freedom of Information Act with demands for exorbitant search fees. In one recent case, People for the American Way sought records about government requests to seal records about immigrants detained after 9/11. The Justice Department initially refused the request, saying that to release information about the detainees would violate the privacy of those individuals. It later amended its response, saying it would gladly conduct a search for the records � for a fee of $372,799.

Dictators like to keep the masses ignorant of their true intentions, while blowing purple smoke up their collective asses. How many times does Bush jave to spit on the constitution before we get a clue? Does he have to install gas-powered showers in GTMO? Start rounding up gays and liberals?

I know, I know. We aren’t supposed to soil the discourse by comparing Bush to Hitler. But for fuck’s sake people, what’s the man got to do before we call him on his fascist thought control actions, grow a little mustache?

Our own government has decided that they don’t want you or me or anyone else who isn’t on the Bush family Christmas Card List to know what they’re planning, who they’re planning on doing it to and who’s getting your tax money in no-bid contracts to do it.

Luckily, there are ways to take action against this.

_________
Thanks to Lynne and Elvira for the links.