Re: OT - President Bush reveals his foolishness

<lazuli777@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1438-44BEC8A4-37@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Yup-worst lying sack of *** Preident we've ever had. I've read a lot on
Tricky *** and Lyin' *** Johnson, but in all their deviousness,
though both were patholgical liars who had an infrastructure of
corruption around them.well before each became President..they also had
some brilliance and understanding of history and did a few good things
in spite of themselves- all we get out of this current crowd is wars,
war mongering,incompetence, fear mongering, law breaking, a uncanny
knack for being wrong on almost every every crucial policy issue, and
one underhanded cover up after another..all with an aw shucks smirk, and
layer upon layer of liars for hire to trot out when needed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-halperin16jul16,0,3832606,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Bush: Worse Than Nixon

The writer was on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," but Bush's power grab has
him really worried.

By Morton H. Halperin
MORTON H. HALPERIN served in the administrations of presidents Johnson,
Nixon and Clinton. He is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress
and the director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Soci

July 16, 2006

THE BUSH administration's warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked
and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it
provoked a case of deja vu.

The Nixon administration bugged my home phone - without a warrant -
beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council,
and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security
advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I
might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the
government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie's
presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in
Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on
everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the
White House.

Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political
opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was,
after all, No. 8 on Nixon's "enemies list" - a curious compilation of 20
people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in
some way with the administration.

The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union
leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was
part of a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our
political enemies," as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971
memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active
opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never
understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words,
"a scandal would be helpful here").

As I watch the Bush administration these days, it's hard not to notice the
clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush
presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for
the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon's
day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme
steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten
American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations
shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what
they learn about those activities.

But there also are important differences, and at first blush, it is hard to
say which administration's policies are worse. Much of what the Nixon
administration did was clearly illegal and in violation of the Constitution.
Nixon and his colleagues seemed to understand that and worked hard to keep
their activities secret. On the occasions when their actions became public,
administration officials tried to blame others for them.

These actions were not limited to its warrantless wiretap program and the
investigation of political opponents by the IRS and other agencies. They
also included, among other things, the burglary of the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist (to find evidence discrediting Ellsberg, who had
leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and the effort to have the
CIA persuade the FBI to call off the investigation of the Watergate burglary
(by asserting that it threatened national security).

Although the Nixon administration did argue (like the Bush administration)
that virtually anything the president did to promote national security was
lawful, it never presented an argument to justify these particular
transgressions.

By contrast, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not engaged in
any such inherently illegal activities. Nor has it, to our knowledge,
specifically targeted its political opponents (aside from the outing of
Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame).

But even though Nixon's specific actions might have been more obviously
illegal and more "corrupt" (in the sense that they were designed to advance
his own career over his rivals), President Bush's claim of nearly limitless
power - including the ability to engage in a range of activities that pose a
fundamental threat to the constitutional order and to our civil liberties -
overshadows all comparisons.

Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their
indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless
wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and
the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third
countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S.
laws and treaty obligations.

When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny
them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the
information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have
the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the
president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the
court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.

Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted
overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all
agencies, including the CIA, Vice President *** Cheney warned lawmakers
that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security.
When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense
appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying
statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.

The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its
committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in
a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such
as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.

During the Nixon years, the laws governing what the president could do and
under what circumstances he needed to inform Congress were murky. There were
no intelligence committees in Congress, and there was no Intelligence
Oversight Act. There was no legislated prohibition on national security
surveillance.

In response to Watergate and the related scandals of the Nixon years,
however, Congress constructed a careful set of prohibitions, guidelines and
requirements for congressional reporting.

Bush's systematic and defiant violation of these rules, as well as of the
mandates of the Constitution and international law, pose a challenge to our
constitutional order and civil liberties that, in the end, constitutes a far
greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.



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