the paranoid style in american politics is a good place to be
The Weekly Standars is the defacto official magazine of the true Neo-Con Movement, as exemplified in the goals of PNAC. One can accuse PNAC of having an imperial vision for America. I’m weary of cries of “imperialism” to describe even misgotten American foreign policy, but I mention it because what strikes me is that in their article defending Bush’s extra-constitutional malarky of wire-tapping without the FISA search warrent, Gary Schmitt sticks quotation marks around the word… as in:
Congress passed and President Carter signed the bill regulating electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence collection in the wake of an extended, post–Watergate debate about the so–called “imperial presidency.”
The phrase “so — called ‘imperial presidency'” gives Scmitt. Remember how the Nixon apologists came out of the woodwork when Mark Felt was revealed to be Deep Throat to attack Felt for his whistle-blowing? Pat Buchanan, Chuck Colson, Ben Stein. We never knew that such a thing as a Nixon-partisan still existed. But apparently they do.
I marvel at this paragraph:
One irony of today’s debate is that so many liberals are now defending FISA. Previously, a common complaint from the ACLU and others was that the secret federal court that issues warrants for foreign intelligence surveillance in this country had become a “rubber stamp” for the executive branch. Out of the thousands of applications put forward by the Department of Justice to the panel over the years, only a handful had ever been rejected. Instead of a check on executive authority, the court had become complicit in its activities-or so it was said.
A similar dilema confronts us all with respect to the CIA, a secretive government agency with a … spotty… record. And the Bush Administration misuses it, forcing… well… defenses of long-term public officials fighting the politicization of the CIA. With respect to FISA and the “rubber stamp” nature of the organization: that is sort of the point here. There’s a law set up that sets up a secret and very accomodating court to wink and nod toward the Fourth Amendment. Presumably it has a limitation… the line drawn somewhere aways from where it’d okay a president from breaking into the Watergate Hotel and bugging his political opponent — remember Nixon and his “Imperial Presidency” that kicked off the whole FISA court?
The Weekly Standard, William Kristol his own bad self, poo-poos the entire idea that the Bush Administration may be wire-tapping anyone other than a call coming in from “Al Qaeda” (“Hello, Dominoes. This is Al Qaeda. I’d like to order a medium pepperoni pizza, please.”) The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism, the title is a take-off of the classic Richard Hofstadter essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I myself once wrote a cutsey essay, found somewhere on this website but for some reason not popping up when I type the phrase into the search box, with the title that theorized that a new and powerful political coalition could be made of the tin-foil hat crew of the right and the tin-foil hat crew of the left that would save the nation from the mushy “see no evil, and everything is skin deep” center. Thus, when I saw the phrase typed in as a search to the website, I always laughed and wondered if a student required to read the Hofstrader piece would think that I was touching on Hofstrader’s thesis, and base a term paper around my concept.
It is funny how William Kristol stops at the PETA example of the round-up of groups who have been spied upon by the Pentagon. The Quakers make for a far more sympathetic group, at least theoretically. I don’t think the average neo-con readership of the Weekly Standard can stand the Quakers, to be honest. But when you purge Nixon from any wrong-doing, and you can rationalize spying on organizations a little out of the mainstream, you can shrug and say “Who cares?” at the fact that the Portland Police Department actually kept files and kept survelliance on red churches. (Time to repaint the churches green, parishioners!) Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they are not watching you.
Gary Schmitt jumps in further to defend the Imperial Presidencies of — well, in their case it would be Nixon, Reagan (I know they’d be defending Oliver North) and Bush, and a more robust American police state in general by poo-pooing the Justice Brandeis quotation “The doctrine of separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power” as at best a half truth. This paragraph sees the novel argument that By the time they convened in Philadelphia, the bias against the executive that arose from the fight with the British crown was pretty well gone. — at best a half-truth: cue the battle between the Federalist Party of John Adams (British crown lovers) and the Republican Party (French Revolutionary lovers). I see the use of the phrase “Unitary” to describe the ideal Executive. A unitary government? British Crown indeed!