The "main components of a police state"

i posted last week on joe conason's new book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush... here's another excerpt, this one from alternet, that highlights leading republicans who see strong reason to be more than a little bit concerned with the megalomaniacal tendencies of the bush administration...

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime."

Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the "main components of a police state" in the Bush administration's declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is "a clear and present danger to the rule of law," and that the president "cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses." Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a "monarchical doctrine" in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

yep, i'm bangin' the drum - again... george has to go... they ALL have to go...

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"A reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology"

raw story highlights a salon excerpt from joe conason's book...

Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush

[Conason] states up front that the idea of an American slide into authoritarianism is not based in any paranoia, but comes because the current president "has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold."

Conason says there is growing public anxiety and anger about the Bush administration's use and abuse of power. Two events that particularly have raised public concern were "the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster." He notes that "we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation."

Their unwillingness to take on the President on these issues was due to an acquiescence with authoritarianism, he writes. He says the "style" of the Bush regime is seen in its "almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty."

i think conason is being a tad circumspect... "authoritarianism" is a fairly mild description of the wholesale constitutional shredding being engaged in by the bush administration... he does use the word "abuse," but it would be much more accurate to protray the bush regime for what it is - a quiet coup d'etat that is bent on reshaping the u.s. into a dictatorial state...

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Conason wakes up to the coup d'etat

even though commenter johann tipped me off to specter's subversive staff action earlier, it went in one ear and out the other - until i read this...

A columnist at Salon has described Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sacking of United States Attorneys involved in controversial prosecutions as an act that amounts to a "coup d'etat."

Joe Conason highlights the removal from office of Carol Lam, Bud Cummings, and John McKay, U.S. Attorneys in San Diego, Little Rock, and Seattle respectively, whose prosecutions ran against the partisan interests of the Bush White House. These acts, Conason writes, suggest that "the White House and the Justice Department have been exposed in a secretive attempt to expand executive power for partisan purposes."

The ability of the White House to swap out U.S. Attorneys with partisan appointees resulted when the staff of Senator Arlen Specter inserted a measure in the renewal of the USA Patriot Act that "permitted the White House to place its own appointees in vacant U.S. attorney positions permanently and without Senate confirmation." According to Conason, Specter says he was not aware of the action by a member of his staff.

as johann quite rightly points out...

Apparently these staffers are more influential than appears on the surface and are operating without oversight and without anyone in the press or the public being aware of who they are or the Senators they work for being aware of what they are doing.

A true shadow government.

it seems to me that this needs a LOT more investigation...

and, without trying to break my arm patting myself on the back, mr. conason, i have been calling bushco's twisted government a quiet coup d'etat for over three years now...

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