Frank Rich: The Coup at Home
Frank Rich
... In the six years of compromising our
principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down
that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve
propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve
become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated
to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a
signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the
better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the
streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American
governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more
effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public
has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule
of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet
coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General
Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom”
concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian
exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to
our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who
control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of
warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert
our values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General
Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to
stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our
president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior,
eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
Take the Musharraf
assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle
as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon
official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms
by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners
volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its
part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up
independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It
merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.
Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling
of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s
diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed
Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship
with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a
prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas
corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising
F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush
administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score:
Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”
To
believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush
presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted
over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in
America has now been internalized as the new normal. ...
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