Senator John McCain has forged a reputation in Washington as a straight takin’, no nonsense kinda guy, unafraid to ask the tough questions and willing to go it alone if necessary. Sadly, his reputation bears no resemblance to reality anymore. McCain now carves a pathetic figure – a irate loose cannon who lost his political instinct years ago. The former Presidential candidate now wades aimlessly into issues he doesn’t fully grasp, launching bitter attacks on rivals and ruining what was left of his independent reputation in Washington. The 76 year old has got nastier and more conservative in recent years, and seems determined to join his party in driving off the cliff of electability. For reasons best known to himself, McCain is still flogging Benghazi conspiracy theories long after he helped block Susan Rice’s nomination to Secretary of State, and long after it was politically relevant. Here was McCain on David Gregory’s show on Sunday discussing the episode that everyone else thought had gone to bed long ago:

JOHN MCCAIN: There’s– so many questions about Benghazi. We’ve had two movies– about getting bin Laden and we don’t even know who the people were who were evacuated from– the consulate the next day after the attack. So there are many, many questions. And we have had– a massive cover-up on the part of–

DAVID GREGORY: But a massive cover-up of what?

DAVID GREGORY: –I mean, Susan Ri– wait a minute– Susan Rice said there was a lot of–

JOHN MCCAIN: Do you care–

DAVID GREGORY: –confusion.

JOHN MCCAIN: Do you care–

DAVID GREGORY: I’m asking you–

JOHN MCCAIN: Do you care to–

DAVID GREGORY: –what is the Republican way–

JOHN MCCAIN: I’m asking you, do you care– I– I’m– I’m asking you, do you care whether four Americans died? Or do you– the reasons for that? And– and shouldn’t pe– people be held accountable for the fact that four Americans died–

DAVID GREGORY: Well, what you said was the cover-up– A cover-up of what?

And on and it went. McCain told Gregory that he would be “Glad to send you a list of the questions that have not been answered,” then stated that he wanted to know, “What did the president do and who did he talk to the night of the attack on Benghazi?” (According to the White House, Obama did not make any phone calls to the Libyan embassy but was updated throughout the night while Hillary Clinton – the Secretary of State – made calls to the embassy). The other  major question McCain thought hadn’t been answered was why the people who were evacuated from the consulate not interviewed the next day (the White House waited until the FBI interviewed the evacuees), and why the President continued to say he didn’t know whether it was a terrorist attack “for two weeks” (Obama actually referred to it as “An act of terror” the day after the attack).

Apparently, this constitutes a ‘Massive Cover Up’.

The details of this supposed cover up are nothing short of ridiculous. There are exhaustive timelines of all the events surrounding the attacks on Benghazi and the White House’s response (Think Progress has a very good one), and it is abundantly clear that while mistakes were made, the Obama administration acted on the best information it had and did not at any point in time try to hide anything from the public. After doing a lengthy Q & A on the events himself, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones concluded:

There were conflicting reports on the ground, and that was reflected in conflicting and sometimes confused reports from the White House. I don’t think anyone would pretend that the Obama’s administration’s response to Benghazi was anywhere near ideal. Nevertheless, the fact is that their statements were usually properly cautious……It’s true that it took about 10 days for all this to really shake out, but let’s be honest: 10 days isn’t all that long to figure out what really happened during a violent and chaotic attack halfway around the world. I get that it’s a nice opportunity for Republicans to score some political points in the runup to an election, but really, there’s not much there there.

So why is McCain still out there fanning the flames?  It’s a question that has no logical answers, and probably has more to do with McCain’s mental state than anything else. He tried and failed to become President twice, and in his last campaign showed signs of serious decline. He failed to vet Sarah Palin and completely fell apart when the economy imploded – two major blunders that showed he was no longer able to make good judgment calls. After losing to Obama, his political instincts seems to have declined even further, joining in with Right wing conspiracy theorists at every turn. McCain has been particularly harsh on Obama’s foreign policy positions – a remarkable fact when you consider how hawkish the President has been while in office (anyone remember the death of Osama Bin Laden or Obama’s drone policy?). McCain seems determined to undermine the President even at the expense of ridiculing himself. And the only explanation is that at the heart of it, McCain is a rather nasty piece of work.

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Andrew Sullivan continues to ask why Ratzinger decided to step down as Pope – a move that is still causing tidal waves in the Catholic Church:

Was watching John Paul II waste away deter him? Or does he sense or understand, in fact, that what he presided over is and was one of the darkest eras in the church, that the crimes he enabled are so horrifying when viewed in their entirety and his record of negligence and cover-up before and after he became Pope has rendered him morally incapable of leading such an institution – indeed in need of withdrawal, reflection and penitence? He prefaced his resignation with the words: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God,  . . . ”

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Disgruntled former Los Angeles policeman and accused mass shooter Christopher Dorner in his Navy uniform.

By Robert Parry

The tragic case of Christopher Dorner, who allegedly killed four people before dying of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot to the head during a fiery standoff in California last week, underscores the central fallacy of the National Rifle Association’s idea about arming “good guys” with guns to kill “bad guys” with guns.

One obvious problem with the NRA argument is that “good guys” can very quickly become “bad guys.” Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, experienced what he considered racist injustice at the hands of his police superiors – and that seems to have driven him into a vengeful rampage.

Indeed, most shooting deaths in the United States involve ordinary people who would pass a background check and thus obtain a gun legally. It is only after some event sets them off – some grievance, some failed romance, some flash of temper, some perceived threat – that they use a gun to kill another person (or to take their own life).

While ending loopholes in background checks clearly makes sense, it is not so easy to define when a person’s mental illness is severe enough to disqualify him or her from acquiring a gun. Nor is it easy to know when an intervention is necessary to disarm someone. Even how to disarm a person is a challenging and potentially dangerous issue that could touch off violence rather than prevent it.

Adam Lanza, the troubled young man who killed his mother and 26 others (including 20 first-graders) in Newtown, Connecticut, used his mother’s legally purchased AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle to carry out the murders, first shooting his sleeping mother in the face before heading to Sandy Hook Elementary School. Lanza’s mother presumably misunderstand how serious her son’s mental instability had become.

For many years, American shooting rampages were known as “going postal” because some earlier mass killings were committed by postal workers who snapped under the time pressures of their work environment. Presumably, these postal workers were “good guys” until they suddenly became “bad guys.”

In Dorner’s case, his work grievances accumulated over time, after he reported what he claimed was excessive violence used by one of his police superiors. However, an internal police investigation sided with Dorner’s superior and deemed Dorner a liar who was then dismissed from the force.

Dorner’s dismissal sent his life into a downward spiral, finally leading to the shooting spree which ended last Tuesday in the mountains above Los Angeles. Dorner, 33, was cornered in a cabin before apparently shooting himself as the cabin burned, police said. Dorner’s charred remains were pulled from the wreckage.

An Anti-Gun Manifesto

Ironically, even as Dorner armed himself, he condemned the ease with which he obtained powerful weapons, including semi-automatic assault rifles that could be converted into fully automatic weapons. In a 6,000-word manifesto recounting his grievances – and condemning the LAPD as racist – Dorner also praised legislative proposals to restrict access to guns.

“The time is now to reinstitute a [weapons] ban that will save lives,” Dorner wrote. “Why does any sportsman need a 30 round magazine for hunting? Why does anyone need a suppressor? Why does anyone need a AR15 rifle? This is the same small arms weapons system utilized in eradicating Al Qaeda, Taliban, and every enemy combatant since the Vietnam war. …

“These do not need to be purchased as easily as walking to your local Walmart or striking the enter key on your keyboard to ‘add to cart’. All the firearms utilized in my activities are registered to me and were legally purchased at gun stores and private party transfers. …

“No more Virginia Tech, Columbine HS, Wisconsin temple, Aurora theatre, Portland malls, Tucson rally, Newtown Sandy Hook. Whether by executive order or thru a bi-partisan congress an assault weapons ban needs to be re-instituted. Period!!! Mia Farrow said it best. ‘Gun control is no longer debatable, it’s not a conversation, its a moral mandate.’”

Despite the obvious contradictions between Dorner’s opinions and his actions, the final days of his life underscored why many of the more modest proposals to reduce gun violence would fail to achieve the sort of public safety that could begin to make shooting deaths much less common.

While requiring background checks and expanding mental health care surely make sense, a strategy that doesn’t restrict the sale of assault weapons and high-quantity magazines would just as surely guarantee many more massacres in the future.

Further, the Dorner case exposes the nuttiness behind the declaration by NRA executive Wayne LaPierre that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — and his suggestion that school personnel should be armed to fend off the next Adam Lanza.

As the example of ex-police officer Dorner demonstrated, the only thing between a good guy with a gun becoming a bad guy with a gun is some extreme experience of anger, disappointment or desperation. So, arming up the U.S. population – instead of beginning a process of de-escalation – only assures more senseless killings.

Putting more guns in the hands of teachers, principals, janitors or even police guards at schools simply multiplies the chances for the next Christopher Dorner to snap.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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In a relative sense the American Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Soon after I was born, my parents took me to visit my great grandfather, Charles Davis, who everyone called “Pappy.” Pappy was living in a VA hospital in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh and it was his 93rd birthday when he was photographed holding me in his arms. Pappy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and Pappy’s father, Richard B. Davis, was a corporal with a Zouave regiment, the 155th PA, in the Union Army and fought at Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg, among other engagements.

That’s how recent the war was. As a baby I was once held by the son of a Civil War veteran.

But on the other hand, 150 years or so is a very long time when we consider post-war racial equality. As many of us observed in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America for good, passed through Congress on its way to ratification in the states in early 1865. Yet the real struggle for racial equality had only just begun and, to this day, still hasn’t been fully realized.

On February 7, 2013, after all this time, the state of Mississippi finally ratified the amendment that abolished slavery.

The state House and Senate voted to ratify it back in 1995, but it wasn’t officially and legally recorded as a ratification until it was delivered by Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann (real name) to Charles A. Barth, director of the Office of the Federal Register. Last week. And this might not have happened at all if Dr. Ranjan Batra, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, hadn’t seen the movie Lincoln and been inspired to check on the status of the state’s approval of the amendment — again, an amendment that had been ratified by most of the states by the end of 1865.

Somehow, when I read this news yesterday, I wasn’t surprised. After all, over the weekend, one of the most discussed news stories was about a racist, slack-jawed hoople named Joe Ricky Hundley (also, real name). On the day after Mississippi finally ratified the 13th, Joe Ricky was traveling aboard Delta Flight 721. Seated behind him was Jessica Bennett and her two-year-old son. When the plane began to descend for landing, the boy began to cry.

Stop here. Whenever we read a news story like this, we automatically begin to imagine what we might’ve done in this situation. Flying is mostly a nightmarish exercise in humiliation and indignity. We’re all in the same predicament, though, so we struggle to put up our best attitude, our happy-faces, and endure it. But there’s always that one guy who thinks he’s in his own living room and everyone else is deliberately inconveniencing him. And he’s not afraid to say so. Joe Ricky is one of those guys times a thousand.

In an FBI affidavit, Bennett testified that Joe Ricky allegedly said to her, “Shut that nigger baby up.”

Classy. But that’s not all. CNN reported: “Hundley then turned around and slapped the 2-year-old in the face with an open hand, which caused the child to scream even louder, the affidavit said.”

And now, I think we can safely assume that if there’s one man in America who just about everyone wants to pummel about his soft, misshapen head, it’s Joe Ricky Hundley.

Yes, I know. We just re-elected our first African American president within a relatively short period of time since the Civil War and an even shorter span of time since the end of Jim Crow and the subsequent era of the Civil Rights Act. That said, we still have a considerably long way to go before the notion of racial intolerance and outright anti-black hatred is abandoned as a terrible relic of our collective past. Over the weekend, Matt Drudge invoked the “lazy and shiftless” racial stereotype against the president when he emphasized his golf trip with Tiger Woods, using the headline: “SPRING BREAK.” Again, this can only be a racial dog whistle since President Obama has taken fewer vacations than any modern president since Truman, other than Bill Clinton who holds the record for the fewest vacation days.

It’s not just Drudge and other members of the conservative entertainment complex, one of the two major political parties in America — the party that currently enjoys a majority in the House of Representatives and filibuster-strength in the Senate — continues to engage in the politics of racial fear. The most recent Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, went further than most recent Republican candidates, going back to the days of Lee Atwater, in his exploitation of the Southern Strategy — using coded language to scare whites into voting against an African American president.

Republican racism goes deeper than that. As Sam Tanenhaus wrote last week, the nullification movement in the Republican Party is on the rise again — the states’ rights and 10th Amendment-driven doctrine that claims to allow for states to overturn or to simply ignore federal laws that are deemed by the state as unconstitutional. John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery states’ rights firebrand of the pre-Civil War era, not to mention the mortal foe of Abraham Lincoln, is the great-great-great-grandfather of the cause. Calhoun once called slavery “a positive good” and used the idea of nullification as a cudgel to oppose any federal government effort to abolish it.

In the 20th Century, nullification was revived by William F. Buckley in the pages of The National Review in response to the civil rights movement, and it was carried forward by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who was one of the hand-picked nullification spokesmen of the conservative far-right. It was the 1950s and 1960s when the conservative movement began to control the Republican Party, dragging it further to the right.

Today, Tanenhaus wrote, Republican politicians like Rand Paul and others are carrying on the legacy of an idea that had its origins in the very attitudes that Lincoln and many others in his footsteps attempted to eradicate. And until mainstream Americans and members of the press truly recognize that the Republican Party is nothing more than a cartoonishly sinister cabal of outdated, disgusting racial scaremongers, we can never hope to cure our society of hate-mongers like Joe Ricky and everyone else of his ilk.

Oh and I almost forgot. Here’s that photo of Pappy and I.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from the AP):

Limits on the size of ammunition magazines and universal background checks passed the Colorado House on Monday, during a second day of emotional debates that has drawn attention from the White House as lawmakers try to address recent mass shootings.

The bills were among four that the Democratic-controlled House passed amid strong resistance from Republicans, who were joined by a few Democrats to make some of the votes close.

The proposed ammunition restrictions limit magazines to 15 rounds for firearms, and eight for shotguns. Three Democrats joined all Republicans voting no on the bill, but the proposal passed 34-31.

“Enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of bloodshed,” said Democratic Rep. Rhonda Fields, a sponsor of the bill and representative of the district where the shootings at an Aurora theater happened last summer. Fields’ son was also fatally shot in 2005.

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I wasn’t actually aware that there was a difference between the two fat and shitty-meat distributing corporations, but this was pretty funny. From GigaOM:

Even by the standards of social media fiascos, this one’s a doozy. On Monday, Burger King’s official Twitter feed announced the chain had been sold to its rival and began posting pro-McDonald’s messages and tales of employee drug use.

The strange Twitter activity took place after hackers apparently took control of Burger King’s account and replaced its name and image with the McDonald’s logo

Here’s the image from Burger King’s twitter feed:

The Burger King account was apparently under hacker control until Twitter suspended the account at around 1.15 pm ET after having posted a number of hilarious tweets including this one:

Burger King has since apologized for the episode, releasing the following statement to the Chicago Tribune:

“We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics”

In a show of fastfood solidarity, McDonald’s tweeted:

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Country singer Mindy McCready, who was found yesterday after shooting herself, joins five of the past 43 participants in VH1’s Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew who have died from drug use or illnesses related to their addiction over the past two years.  Fellow contestants include Alice in Chains’ bassist Mike Starr, actor Jeff Conaway, Rodney King, and reality TV star Joey Kovar.

It’s not great press for Dr. Drew Pinsky –  a relentless self promoter whose exploitation of celebrity culture seems to know no bounds.

Pinksy is a likable character – charming, seemingly compassionate and a natural star himself. He seems to be broadcast on every media medium on a daily basis, and has for years been America’s de facto national health service. He doles out sensible advice on sex, drugs and other illnesses affecting the youth generation, and does appear to genuinely care about the patients he treats on his shows. Pinsky has spoken out loudly against celebrity culture, even writing a book about it called The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America. In an interview with USA Today, Pinsky said:

I’ve been working with celebrities many, many years. I’ve treated many for chemical dependency and the like. They have profound childhood trauma. It’s not something to do with their job or the life they lead. They just happen to be people driven to seek celebrity as a way to make themselves feel better. Then the question becomes, why are we preoccupied with this population? This points toward the mirror. We, too, have been increasingly narcissistic. I speculate that that’s what drives us toward this phenomenon of elevating people to almost god-like status. It’s not so much that it’s the glamour we like focusing on — rather it’s the dysfunction. We’re taking someone who needs to be a god and making them a god. Then we spend all our energy tearing them down.

Pinsky sounds convincing on subject, but the reality is that the shows he hosts ultimate reinforce and promotes the very culture that produces the suffering itself. Dr. Drew may rail against celebrity culture and its excesses, but if he truly believe that, he wouldn’t be on television airing celebrity’s problems to make money and get ratings. In fact Pinsky would never go on pop culture networks like VH1 and MTv given their main focus is entertaining young people with the exploits of idiotic celebrities. Pinsky can claim that he is merely trying to reach the biggest audience he can with his message, but the reality is that he makes a fortune out of celebrity voyeurism and does not have to answer to anyone for the fallout.

No one is blaming Dr. Drew directly for the deaths of his patients. Drug and alcohol addiction ultimately catches up to a significant percentage of sufferers who are unable to beat their demons. But there is an argument to be made that the show has a more long term, damaging effect on the recovery process than any initial success it may have.

Having lived in Los Angeles myself for close to 10 years, I can unequivocally attest to the enormous damage celebrity culture  has on people. Thousands of people flock to Los Angeles every year to make it in the entertainment industry – many of them attempting to reinvent themselves after escaping dysfunction and broken homes. Hollywood attracts the vain and fragile, and the city chews them up and spits them out with no remorse. It is a city built on pretending to be something you’re not, and it catches up with everyone no matter how high they climb.

As I got older I found it increasingly difficult to live in a culture that idolized an industry that counts American Idol and Transformers 3 as major achievements. It’s not that I have a problem with entertainment – I watch TV and movies and grew up in a media family. I just don’t think it deserves more respect or adulation than any other industry, and the prominence it is given does active harm to the impressionable.

Dr. Drew’s patients are victims of that culture – people who had varying degrees of success in the industry but ultimately could not escape their own fragility. Fame is a drug that satiates insecurity, but does not cure it. Part of the allure of ‘Celebrity Rehab’ is not only a chance stop the vicious cycle of addiction, but to relaunch ailing careers by getting air time that would otherwise not be available to them. So while Dr. Drew’s soothing words and method for treating addiction may have success in the short term, the media exposure and attention they receive prolongs the ultimate source of their problems – celebrity culture itself.

Lindsay Lohan, the poster child for screwed up celebrities, was apparently offered $1 million appear on the show. While Dr. Drew and his team would have treated her to the best of their abilities, there’s no doubt why she was invited on the show. Ratings would have gone through the roof as millions of people would have tuned in to see her erratic behavior and the media would have had a bonanza lampooning her every move. There’s no way Dr. Drew could possibly think that the process would have been good for her, leading to the obvious conclusion that it is his paycheck that matters above all else.

Despite Pinsky’s continual claims that he always follows the interests of the patient and abides to strict medical ethics, his history outside of television is also highly troubling. In a huge Justice Department settlement last year with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, are details of a lucrative deal Pinsky made with the company to promote the depression drug Wellbutrin (also known as Bupropion). According to the Washington Post:

In March and April 1999, according to receipts unearthed by federal investigators, Pinsky was paid a total of $275,000 by Glaxo Wellcome, the GlaxoSmithKline precursor that manufactured Wellbutrin.

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If it had been aired, the Saturday Night Live parody of the confirmation hearings of Senator Chuck Hagel would have marked a serious turning point in American media culture. Even though the skit didn’t air officially, it does show that comedians are now willing to confront the extraordinary bias towards Israel in mainstream culture – a once taboo subject that could have resulted in being blacklisted.

The parody portrays Republicans as going ridiculously over-the-top in harassing Hagel for not going far enough in expressing unyielding love for Israel. Sen. Tim Scott claims that as an African-American Republican from South Carolina, he has deep emotional ties to the country, saying that “Israel has the nicest people, the tallest mountains and the best hip-hop.” At one point in the sketch, John McCain challenges Chuck Hagel to agree to fellate a donkey on the orders of Benjamin Netanyahu for the security of Israel.

It’s funny stuff, and painfully accurate. Chuck Hagel, a conservative Republican in virtually every way imaginable, has essentially been devoured by his own party (amazingly being subjected to a filibuster in order to obstruct his pathway to Secretary of Defense) on the basis that he is insufficiently pro Israel. The charges are, by any reasonable standard, pathetic. Hagel has criticized Israel in the past and asserted that American foreign policy should be dictated by America and not the Jewish state – an apparently controversial stance that means he cannot be trusted to helm America’s defense department.

Attacking this bizarre status quo has been completely off limits until very recently, and the unofficial release of the SNL skit shows that a deeper rebellion within mainstream America is simmering beneath the surface.

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President George W. Bush.

By Lawrence Davidson

In the halls of Congress and confines of the Oval Office, the perception is that the U.S. is at war with an enemy called al-Qaeda. Is this actually the case or is the claim an exaggerated piece of propaganda that has conveniently captured the minds of leaders whose abuse of power has become institutionalized?

In modern history “war” most often describes a condition of armed conflict between two or more states. War is also a condition that has a discernible beginning and a definite end. Your state officially declares war, you take territory, destroy the other state’s army, its government raises a white flag, signs a cease fire or, preferably, a peace treaty, and that’s that.

Sometimes, a national government will want to hide the fact that the nation is at war and, as in the case of the United States in Korea (1950s) or in Vietnam (1960s), it does so through a blatant, but no less effective, bit of propaganda: in place of a declaration of war it goes about calling its violent behavior a “police action.” In truth, however, these add up to wars waged against other states.

So, at least from the point of view of custom and tradition, not just any category of hostilities can be a “war.” For instance, feuds, vendettas, punitive actions, ethnic violence, tribal hostilities and the like, as bloody as they might be, are not traditionally thought of as wars.

The War on Terror

Unfortunately, the traditional definition of what constitutes a war is changing and not for the better. Back in 2001 the United States was attacked by a shadowy organization called al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was not a nation nor a government nor a state of any sort. Perhaps it was a loose collection of several thousand like-minded people bound together by an ideologically similar worldview, as well as a stark sense of being wronged.

I think it is accurate to say that al-Qaeda devotees saw themselves “at war” with the United States because, they believed that the U.S. had attacked the Muslim “umma,” or community. Osama bin Ladin, the head of al-Qaeda, said as much in his public “declaration of jihad” released in 1996.

However, al-Qaeda’s perspective was not binding on the American government and, in truth, it makes no sense at all for the United States to say it is at war with an entity that, from the Western point of view, was, and to some extent still is, little more than a bunch of saboteurs.

Perhaps the speechwriters and government public relations officers back in 2001 understood this dilemma and so, instead of declaring that the U.S. was at war with al-Qaeda, they concocted the term, “war on terror.” It was an interesting side-step, but it too made no sense.

As has been said so many times before, terror is a tactic, and one that is used by many more groups than al-Qaeda. Governments too, even the U.S. government on too many occasions, use “state terror” against other peoples. Nonetheless, it was not long before U.S. officials and politicians were using the “war on terror” to justify all of its reactions to the 9/11 attacks.

Under the Bush administration this may have started out as propaganda. President George W. Bush wanted war, but his targets were as yet conventional nation states. Bush was a cowboy, a “bring’em on” kind of guy who was prone to playing fast and loose with language and rules, to say nothing of truth. He did all of this to get at those on his “enemies list.”

Al-Qaeda and the “war on terror” then, were tied to those states that Bush wanted to invade. Afghanistan was an obvious one, but really, for the administration, was an unavoidable diversion from more important targets. Soon after the 9/11 attacks Bush demanded that the Taliban rulers in Kabul turn over Osama bin Laden (who was a “guest” in that country). When they equivocated and asked for evidence that bin Laden was involved in the crime, Bush did not even answer. He just pulled the trigger.

Iraq was harder to bring off. The administration had to contrive a connection between bin Laden and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Then they arranged to supply themselves with fallacious intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If “Operation Iraqi Freedom” had gone as they expected, the next target was to be Iran.

None of this would have been possible if the 9/11 attacks had not put the entire country into a panic. It is moments like these when no one is thinking straight that one makes the mistakes which, in the future, one can’t help but regret.

So, with the nation running scared, our Congress passed the Authorization for the use of Military Force, which allowed the President to use military force against countries and groups that supported the 9/11 attacks. That was the turning point. With the “war on terror” as a one-size-fits-all cover, the government could say we were “at war” with anyone allegedly tied to al-Qaeda and 9/11. Now, George W. Bush and his compatriots were unleashed.

Thanks to the Orwellian Patriot Act, another 2001 piece of legislative panic, the U.S. got suspension of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, searches and seizures without warrants, wiretaps without effective court oversight, and the FBI asserting the right to force your local librarian to tell them what books you borrow. All of which the American Civil Liberties Union correctly identifies as serious erosions to U.S. constitutional rights.

Institutionalizing Abuse

There is something disturbingly common about all of this. The “war on terror” that seems constituted to never end and the Patriot Act with which no real patriot could ever rest easy, are at once products of and facilitators for abusive impulses that, historically, people in power are both loath to admit to and equally loath to surrender.

To wit: Barrack Obama’s claim that he has “legal” justification (no one bothers claiming a moral justification) to kill anyone, including U.S. citizens, identified by some anonymous “informed high U.S. government official” as an al-Qaeda member posing an “imminent” danger to the United States.” There are all kinds of problems with this claim. As Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, clear evidence of an “imminent” attack is, in practice, not required. Just some official’s belief will do.

However, right now these are not the problems I wish to focus on. What interests me is that just about every modern U.S. president has broken domestic and international law in one way or another. While some turn out to be worse than others, they all do it. It doesn’t matter if it was Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and certainly his son, or Barack Obama. Nor, of course, is this loathsome phenomenon unique to our leaders in Washington. How come?

Here are some possible answers:

– An historical lack of accountability. Right from the founding of the nation there has been an unspoken assumption that, under certain circumstances, the president can break the law. Here are just a few early examples of this sort of notorious behavior: Andrew Jackson’s ignoring the Supreme Court in order to rob the Cherokee; James Polk’s lying to Congress to start a war with Mexico; Woodrow Wilson’s deplorable record of arresting and jailing non-violent dissidents during World War I.

And, in each instance nothing happened to these presidents. They got away with breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold. This record inevitably has created a precedent that is for all intents and purposes institutionalized. Our modern presidents are just following the historical bearing.

I remember when Richard Nixon was exposed as the “master mind” behind the Watergate burglary. Most people were going about saying that it was unthinkable to send a president to jail. My response at the time was that it was exactly because Nixon was the president that he must be sent to jail. Instead, he was pardoned and reemerged as the publicly acclaimed guru of foreign policy.

– Groupthink. When politicians run for office their constituency is the pool of voters who are eligible to elect them. The politicians will speak to the likes and dislikes of the voters and propose policies that cater to their concerns. What happens after they are elected? The fact is that their constituency changes. In office, their immediate constituency becomes the political party to which they belong, its needs and, most significantly, its perceived obligations to the interest groups and lobbies which supply most of the party members with campaign funds.

This reorientation to a new constituency creates a narrowed informational environment. For instance, in the case of the president, information gathered by the mired intelligence agencies becomes acceptable or unacceptable according to its compatibility with the demands of the new constituency.

The situation must influence who a president chooses for his advisers and cabinet members, for the entire group will now go about creating policies and proposing legislation shaped under the influence of these special interests. The whole process restructures the perception of what is politically desirable and what is politically possible.

Within this narrowed world, there exists the unspoken acceptance of criminal behavior on the part of the president, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. If there are disputes between Congress and the Executive Branch in regard to such behavior, the best one can hope for is a Congressional demand for oversight.

So, in terms of drones and assassination, what you now have is the demand for some sort of judicial court (a sort of Star Chamber) to oversee the foul play. Otherwise, Congress and most of the special-interest constituents accept the abuse as almost normal behavior. This makes the president’s cabinet room a safe haven for the creation and rationalization of criminal conspiracies.

There are no doubt other social forces at work that facilitate the creation of such policies as assassination, indefinite detention, torture and entrapment. But, with the exception of a handful of civil liberties organizations, there has been no popular resistance to the long-term drift into official criminality. Today’s public, reconciled to all of this by propaganda and the fear it creates, will not protest in any politically significant way, even though polls indicate that, when asked, they are uneasy with all of it.

One suspects that none of this institutionalized abuse of power is really necessary to assure national security. With a bit of imagination and a lot of public discussion, other ways, compatible with the Constitution, can be devised to meet the safety needs of the community. But, alas, from within the walls of Washington’s narrowed informational environment, no one thinks outside the box, and no significant change for the better can be expected.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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