Lots of further links at the website version.
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23411.htm>
Bush's Third Term? You're Living It
By David Swanson
September 02, 2009 "TomDispatch" --- It sounds like the plot for the
latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W.
Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won
or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it.
With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval
Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a
mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account
the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?
There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still
creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still
violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of
extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries
with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can
even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention,
sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes
habeas corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture,
still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his
subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if
needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him
continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while
protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him
propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the
world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war
funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final
supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he
would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be
needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his
Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the
Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better
part of our public budget.
Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he
signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops
to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow
through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that
the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be
maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands
more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there.
He'd probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his
second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike
into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like
Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even
be expanding the number of private security contractors in
Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with
disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John
("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at
least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and
Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people
like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of
the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political
purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like
former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor
Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.
In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated
in his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar
crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would
certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term
would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying
around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the
Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign.
At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would
have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.
If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed
reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush,
the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House
with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn
such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to
release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no
way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.
During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from
Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials
responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained
untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers
during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have
gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only
low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution.
Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be
touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he
would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant
immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term
secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by
lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly
worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of
day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and
the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would
remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting
in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his
wrongdoing out of sight.
Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is
also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following
Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of
law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what
were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama
has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course.
Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts
to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the
assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency
in its first seven months.
Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For
one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving
expanded presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars,
military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless
spying, and the obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In
addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice
movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut
down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from
the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands
to his doorstep.
If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more
active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really
end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the
Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be
able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more
years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.
David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories
Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the
University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for
President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities
and hopes to see you on the road. Check out his tour schedule by
clicking here.
Copyright 2009 David Swanson
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