One of All the King's Men: The Mukasey Nomination

Judge Michael Mukasey’s confirmation is irrelevant. And, so is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) hands-off approach to the “buckets of ink” opposition to his nomination. [Roll Call sub req] What is relevant is the oversight the Congress is willing to assume in the operations of the all-but-dismantled Department of Justice, and a Bush administration flailing about trying to cover up its own criminality. [MSNBC]

The “torture issue” is merely one element in an administration fully willing, and demonstrably able, to ignore those laws it finds inconvenient.

The State of Florida had its own statutes pertaining to the recounting of votes in 2000, but that didn’t stop Bush supporter John Bolton from yelling, “I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count,” in a Tallahassee Library on Saturday, December 9, 2000. [Nation] If Florida statutes weren’t compatible with what the Bush-Cheney team wanted, then the Bush-Cheney team would challenge them in a friendly and Republican activist Supreme Court. So was born the inverse populist, both the reflection and refraction of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, an administration that moved from the “the stench of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” [VQR]

Members of the Bush administration prior to the attacks of September 2001 apparently felt the need to by-pass federal and state statutes on personal privacy and individual liberty. Indeed, even the 4^th Amendment was inconvenient. The Bush Administration National Security Agency had been eavesdropping on Americans prior to the attacks [GWU], and the extent and scope of its domestic surveillance program has yet to be fully documented. We know that the Total Information Awareness project incorporated extensive data mining, so extensive that a Republican controlled Congress refused to fund it in 2003. We know that the Pentagon thought it was necessary to spy on the Lake Worth, FL Quakers [CD] and that homeland security officials in Georgia thought it appropriate to arrest vegans protesting Honey Baked Ham. [ACLU] If an administration is truly born to the stench of the didie, then perhaps this explains its focus on gathering information unto itself, just as Jack Burden is called upon to gather unto Willie Stark the information that will promote Willie’s control over the levers of power.

The problem with governing from fictional sources is that the fictional characters inhabit a universe entirely of the author’s creation, often with little connection to reality. Authors and dramatists offer us just enough reality to allow us to suspend our disbelief, but not so much that the elements of the drama or plot can be re-created in reality. Evidently, John Yoo and other apologists for the Bush-Cheney Administration believed that somewhere in the real world “terrorists” would behave like the ones on our televisions and movie screens. They could be ferreted out with high-tech surveillance, avoiding the more expensive, but often more effective, human police work. They could be taken to secret locations and made to spew the details of their nefarious plots just like the miscreants in the rubber-hose scenes in film noire motion pictures; despite decades of military and intelligence research indicating that just the opposite is the case. [Atl] If Jack Bauer could “make it work” on television, surely the government could make it work in reality. However, Bauer is a fiction and the reactions of the villains are scripted. No amount of wishful thinking in the Bush-Cheney dream world can make the real world follow its script. This hasn’t stopped the Administration from attempting to re-write even the basic tenets of our Constitution to fit its screen play.

The original Yoo memo set forth the ultimate protections for an intrinsically weak Administration desperate to secure to itself the trappings of power: “By their terms, these provisions vest full control of the military forces of the United States in the President. The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of Commander in Chief is assigned solely to the President. It has long been the view of this Office that the Commander-in-Chief Clause is a substantive grant of authority to the President and that the scope of the President's authority to commit the armed forces to combat is very broad.” [Yoo memo] What Yoo offered the Administration was a blank check. No treaty, no statute, no Constitution, indeed no mores and values, could stand in the face of a President at war. Nixon famously said, “If the President does it, that means it’s not illegal;” [CL] [Frost: Guardian UK] Bush simply changed the line to read “if the commander in chief does it, it’s not a crime.” However, the Bush-Cheney Administration, born to the stench of the didie, needed more than a war to maintain its fictional perspective and dysfunctional operations. It needed to be re-elected.

Just as Jack Burden was an accessory to Willie Stark’s accession to the governorship, so Karl Rove, the RNC, and the tentacles of Republican operations aided the re-election campaign of 2004. If campaign laws were inconvenient, they could be stretched. Cut outs and careful money routing could cover the connections between the Swift Boat Veterans from the Bush-Cheney re-election team. [NYT] Questionable Election Day tactics from friendly Secretaries of State could reduce the turn out in minority neighborhoods. [PFAW] Caging could be used to eliminate voters who might support alternative candidates. [McClatchy] The election was won, but the stench lingered.

When the primary purpose of an administration is not to govern, but to perpetuate itself, then all rules, regulations, statutes, judicial decisions, and Constitutions become impediments. It becomes more important to reward industries likely to support the administration rather than to encourage the development of new ones; to wit the support for the fossil fuel corporations at the expense of alternative fuels and those companies that manufacture products to control emissions.

It becomes more important to cover up ineptitude, incompetence, and criminality than to uncover and deal with it. It becomes more important to argue from exceptionally narrow premises than to support broad tenets of law. For example, we are now hearing Administration apologists argue that Congress is at fault in the controversy over the use of torture because they are the ones who should have made water-boarding illegal. [CL] Evidently desperate to justify their Administration, the right wing seeks on one hand to have an all-encompassing Presidency accountable to no statute while demanding that the Legislative Branch enact tightly specific laws to curb Administration excesses. This is also the equivalent of saying that the President cannot be trusted to carry out his duties without the strict supervision of a parental Congress willing to supervise his every move as if he were a child in a toy store. This, you may touch; that, you may not.

The unfortunate example of Judge Mukasey’s nomination is simply one of a myriad of instances in which the Bush-Cheney Administration has placed partisan loyalty and political power above the laws, the judicial decisions, and the Constitution itself. An otherwise sentient individual was willing at the outset to decry the use of torture until obviously directed by political operators in the White House to renege on his initial comments, to protect a President who is long past protection. Mukasey is just another Jack Burden in a thoroughly corrupt Stark government.

The Bush White House, which never seemed to care about this nation’s welfare and prestige as much as it did about its own accumulation of power and patronage, has nominated yet another puppet administrator to yet another department. No one should be surprised. And, no one should forget for a single second that these puppets must be carefully supervised, thoroughly investigated, and continually watched, because they are incapable of functioning as independent voices in a free society. They are merely one of all "The King's Men."