The road to 1984

The President who has made such a large straw man of what he likes to call “Activist Judges” or judges who use ethics, morality, common sense, precedent and perhaps a bit of pragmatism to interpret the law, is of course the President who feels the need to attach “signing statements” that he feels enable him to enforce, ignore or apply selectively anything the founding fathers wrote into the Constitution or that Congress has written into law.

Along with the briefly vertebrate John McCain, America seems to feel comfortable with the compromise reached Thursday and with having moved closer to a government of men and further from a government of laws, at least as concerns the monarchical moods of George Bush and perhaps America will feel comfortable with the latest exercise in Judicial Activism that would, according to national security adviser Stephen Hadley, provide enough "clarity" to allow the CIA's interrogation program to go forward. I fear that “clarity” means “License” to the mind of Bush.

Without mention of the historical uniqueness of the notion that the Geneva Conventions are inimical to the American way of war and without mentioning the apparent failure so far to produce anything in the way of any advantage in countering militant Islam around the world, Bush yet insists that secret trials, secret prisons and years of unremitting torment used on people suspected of knowing something is the "most potent tool we have” in order to "get their secrets."

But this is a man who believes in magic, in superstition, in legend and most ridiculously in the special holiness of people who torture, maim and kill innocent people in the name of Jesus Christ and cultural supremacy. Is it funny that the enemies who came closest to defeating us in the last century and to defeating freedom as we used to define it, felt the same way?