Why Support the President?

The question arises, “Should one support the President?” Let me venture, with transparent methodology, my answer.

If one were to always support the President, this would be a simple conversation indeed. But that cannot be the case. It is generally accepted that a President can legitimately and deservingly lose the support of his constituency, but to say this alone would be assuming the conclusion.

Adolf Hitler was democratically elected and, though he seized power undemocratically, it offends our intuitions to say that the German citizens under him were obligated to support him throughout his tenure. Likewise, rulers much less offensive are undeserving of the support of their electorate, whether they have committed crimes or abused their power in other ways. It makes sense that one should support a President, but when in the absence of offensive circumstances.

The response that a “solid front” ought to be presented holds a small amount of water. In the case of warfare or national crises, certainly it is valuable to appear united to each other and to a nation’s collective enemies. Yet we find that, in these situations, a President usually generates his own support. For example: the days immediately following September 11th, the Great Depression, etc. It is after either time or an action of the leader (or a combination of both) that the populace’s fervor begins to wane: it is either when a President does nothing to keep the support of his people, or when he does something actively to lose that support.

Reiterating: it is valuable to appear united against a common cause. But that value, as we saw by allusion to Hitler, cannot be overriding, otherwise we would always be compelled to support the President. Certainly, as we have seen, there must be other considerations, the sum of which can override the benefit of a ‘united front.’ For a short list of such offenses, I offer: gross abuses of human rights, warrantless domestic wiretapping, wars of aggression, etc. These offenses in concert, and arguably, if sufficiently radical, alone, can trump the necessity for a united front.

In these cases, when the actions of a leader may gain the overwhelming and passionate censure of the world, it may be in the national interest to disagree vocally with a President. If it were possible that one’s enemies could understand that, e.g. America’s President doesn’t speak for the people, it may be in the interest of the citizens to mitigate the hatred of their enemies by communicating just such a message. Certainly it would appear better to the world for a majority of the citizens of a country to visually disagree with the policies of their leadership than to acquiesce, especially when such acquiescence is a very real material threat.

We have seen that it is not always the case that a populace should stand behind their President, and that certain gross abuses warrant a vocalized dissatisfaction. But perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between a President’s actions and his office. Perhaps we should, as it were, ‘love the sinner but hate the sin.’ How quaint!

However, I know of no way to judge a man but by his character, informed in turn directly by his actions and words. I choose then to proportion my support for a person based on their character. Indeed, we often hear of a President having ‘disgraced the office.’ In this case, we see the President [qua a person] and his actions judged at once, and yet disconnected from the Office of the President itself and the honor that it is due. In this sense we tend to think that the Office, as it were, deserved better than such and such a person.

There is no doubting that a healthy patriotism demands a respect for the ideals of this country, the virtue and prescient wisdom of the Constitution included. Therein lies the demanded respect for the Office of the President, but blind support placed behind a potentially destructive and sinister — and ultimately, undeniably fallible — human being is no patriotism. It is wrong and it is dangerous, and it has no place in serious political discourse as an overarching principle.

A Third Revival

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

Casting the world in black and whites, in “good and evil,” is a gross truncation of logic, or, rather, an utter ignorance and scathing betrayal of logic. The tendency to do just that is a side effect of strong religious faith — it is one of the reasons people seek religion, for easy answers to hard questions.

People don’t want to consider that terrorists are humans with the same feelings and motives as we, that they legitimately feel victimized, and that maybe, just maybe it’s not our “freedom” but our foreign policy that shapes their beliefs.

You will find few strict dichotomies in the real world, just like you will find few absolutes. To jump to conclusions, to exaggerate, to hastily label: these habits have no place in civil and constructive rhetoric. It is unfortunate, indeed, that our President would resort to such tactics and — more sadly — that they would find broad appeal and acceptance in the populace. I just ask that you take a step back and analyze things.

Black Sites

The recent admission of the existence of CIA Black Sites — secret prisons — is sweet and sour. It is refreshing that the President will, after he has come around, tell the truth. The reverse, however, also holds — to come clean, he has to have at first lied.

(Add it to the laundry list of misleading or blatantly false statements: Iraq and 9/11, Katrina and the levees, NSA wiretapping, “We do not torture,” etc.)

Still, the President came down in defense of the prisons, saying they are ‘necessary tools’ in the war on terror. Are secret prisons necessary tools in the war on crime here at home? What advantage to secret sites have?

Let us deal in extremes for a moment: Which is more effective: building a monolithic and oppressive structure on a hilltop that proclaims, “If you attack us, you will go there,” or conducting our war and quietly shuffling off the enemy combatants, under cover of darkness and without a nod to their whereabouts to somewhere underground and ignored? Granted, it may be more ominous for the enemy to realize that they will be hidden and their wellbeing unbeknownst to the outside world, but I insist that, as with criminals at home, it’s more effective for terrorists to have prisons to look forward to.

But that’s okay, our administration has done both — with Abu Ghraib as a regrettably all-too-visible prison, and now our Black Sites are in the open as well. Both sides of this coin — the visible and the invisible were executed poorly by the administration: although the latter should have never been attempted, the former was an exercise in gross abuse of power.

Although it is refreshing for the President to come clean, it is still unfortunate to have had this situation to own up to.

Stem cell veto

If Bush believed stem cell research was murder, if using embryos for research was murder, I don’t understand why he only vetoed funding for the practice. One under that impression would, I think, act to outlaw the practice outright.

Instead, in 2001, when Bush signed the bill that outlawed creating new ‘lines’ for research, it was a strange gesture from a man who otherwise claims to never compromise his ideals, and who unabashedly thinks in black and white. Why are we not seeing a push from Bush to make stem cell research illegal, and to prosecute the doctors who participate in such research? Bush has drawn criticism from scientists for being a hypocrite because of this. He is, in effect, saying that he will allow federal funding for some murder, but no more past an arbitrary point. And he’ll allow private and state funding for more murder. That does not make sense to me.

Other than that, I do not understand why Bush has vetoed the bill at all. The moral implications he and other Republicans are so fond of pointing to are poorly founded.

These embryos are extras that are used in in-vitro fertilization. They are otherwise slated for destruction. Why is it okay to destroy these unfeeling, unconscious piles of cells, but not to use them to conduct research that could save countless lives? It purely does not make sense.

Additionally, it is impossible to point to a clump of cells and say, “This will be a human.” Those cells could become the placenta, or the umbilical cord, which are both commonly destroyed. And what if the embryo splits and creates two humans? Which one is the original then? Even until 18 weeks, the fetus cannot feel pleasure or pain, it is not awake nor self conscious. To protect it simply because it is a human is entirely arbitrary. Medical procedures that are funded by the government and take place daily inflict much more pain and suffering on thinking, feeling creatures.

Democracies don’t not breed terrorism

Bush has said before that his democratic world-tour crusade is inspired by the belief that ‘democracies don’t breed terrorism.’ But that’s just not true.

If Timothy McVeigh is a terrorist, if the Unibomber is a terrorist, if the Anthrax Mailer is a terrorist, then terrorism has been bred here in the United States.

We have seen political parties whose platform condones or endorses terrorism come to power recently in the Middle East, as well. In Lebanon’s parliament, Hezbollah occupies fourteen of one hundred and twenty eight seats. Hamas won seventy-eight of Palestine’s one hundred and thirty two legislative seats in January, an effective majority.

Democracy promotes the will of the people. If the will of the people be terrorism against others, then that’s exactly what gets instated. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about terrorism and democracy, nothing at all, and a number of particular examples smashes that universal claim to bits.

Gitmo Reversal

Some good news is coming out of the Bush administration today. It reminds me of when Bush admitted he made a mistake by telling the insurgents to “bring it on.”

The White House has decided it will apply the Geneva Conventions to detainees at Gitmo, etc. That’s grand. Of course, this is the way it should have always been, but it’s good that they’re changing their minds now.

But all is not well. From CNN: “‘It’s not really a reversal of policy,’ [White House Press Secretary Tony] Snow asserted, calling the Supreme Court decision ‘complex.’”

Oh shut up. I don’t know why it’s so hard for the administration to admit that they’re wrong. For the rest of mankind it’s a sign of strength and virtue to state that you’ve made a mistake, you’ve learned from your mistake, and you’re righting some wrongs. But Bush and his cronies remain, for the most part, headstrong, stubborn, and as cowboyish as ever.

Parallels in History

In Thom Hartmann’s book, What Would Jefferson Do?, the author outlines many similarities between Hitler and Bush.

After a questionable rise to power, Hitler blamed a national catastrophe on Middle Eastern terrorists. He backed a law that sweepingly curtailed civil liberites, after being forced to include sunset provisions; many legislators, after the fact, complained that they had not had time to read the bill before it was passed. He suspended habeas corpus and defended the right to hold suspected terrorists without due process, charges, or trial. He authorized sweeping wiretaps and surveillance of Germans. He began referring to Germany as the Homeland, and consolidated intelligences agencies under one department. He did it all in the name of Christianity, and all German soldiers wore a beltbuckle that read “God is with us.”

Hitler brought corporate allies into the high levels of government. He shot back at critics, labeling them “anti-German”, accusing them of insulting Germany’s valiant soldiers, and slandering them as “intellectuals and liberals.”

Hitler insisted on the right to pre-emptive war and, after invading Austria, he insisted that “Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.”

Food for thought. How much will we tolerate, as a people? How far will it go?

Once Again, on Iraq and WMD’s

On Larry King Live just now, when Bush was asked if he would choose to remove Saddam Hussein from power knowing everything he knew now, Bush insisted he would. He restated that Saddam was a tyrannical dictator, and stated that, “at the very least, he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.”

But that’s not true, according to the United Nations.

On October 6th, Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group — a fact-finding mission composed of British, American, and Australian experts — appeared before the Senate. Duelfer announced that the group had come to its conclusions about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction: Since the Gulf War in 1991, when crippling sanctions were imposed, Iraq had produced no weapons of mass destruction, nor had it had the capacity to do so. Just to set the record straight. There were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no potential for weapons of mass destruction.

Supreme Court rules against Military Tribunals

So, the Supreme Court, in specific reference to Hamdan, a detainee who admitted he was bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard, rejected the authority of the executive to try prisoners in military tribunals.

From CNN: “The enemy combatant designation, according to the Bush administration, means the suspect can be held without charges in a military prison without the protections of the U.S. criminal justice system, such as the right to counsel — a status the [Supreme] court rejected.” These people have been denied so many protections that the Constitution guarantees them. It’s ironic they’re held in a prison that flies the American flag, while the policies fly in the face of our highest law.

It’s refreshing to see a ruling that defends civil liberties come out of the court, after they ruled that police don’t have to knock before entering a person’s home. Although, Bush’s buddy Alito ruled in favor of the government, and Roberts, absent from the Supreme Court ruling, had ruled in favor of the government at the appellate level. I’m sure Bush is happy that they’re defending his outrageous, draconian power-grabs.

Tracking international banking

This new issue with tracking international banking, as reported in the New York Times, does not bother me.

It’s possible that I don’t feel threatened because I don’t routinely transfer sums of a thousand dollars between foreign banks. But I don’t subscribe to that argument when it is used by conservatives to defend phone taps mutatis mutandis. “I’m not a terrorist, so I don’t have anything to hide.”

As well, I don’t chastise the New York Times for reporting the program. It is silly for the administration to be up at arms over something so obvious, or at least, something already widely known. For example, before the NSA phonetapping program was revealed, an episode of ‘24′ showed one terrorist slapping another for talking to a cohort over the phonelines.

If TV terrorists can figure it out, I think real terrorists, who would be much more careful, since their actual survival is on the line, would figure it out as well.

The same goes for this program. George Bush said before, in the aftermath of September 11th, that the country was working to freeze the monetary assets of terrorist organizations abroad. Why is this revelation profound and offensive to the administration, if we already knew about their foreign assets? Beats me. We had to get that information somehow.

But I haven’t solved the problem: the seeming contradiction in my rebuke of the NSA’s program but acceptance of the bank spying. What sort of relevant disanalogies are to be found? Well, it is more difficult to link an account number to a name than it is to link a telephone to a name — although possibly not for the government.

Maybe it’s that I’ve always accepted that governments do this kind of work, follow the money as it were. I can’t say that it is more likely this will produce a lead on a real terrorist, since calling a known terrorist cell phone number is probably as good a clue as any.

Perhaps the simple answer is that this program of bank spying does not resemble the NSA phonetapping, in that it was not an intrusive measure, involving the eavesdropping of Americans wholesale, instituted in the sensational days immediately after September 11th, when all of our collective reason faltered. As well, the administration insists that it is within the law on this particular program, procuring warrants when necessary. They have not fallen back onto the defense that, while they are not procuring warrants, what they are doing is within the Constitution.

Finally, I trust the New York Times’, as a member of the press, the fourth estate, whose implicit objective is to provide as a check on the government, in its reporting. I cannot speak for how I would feel about the program if I didn’t know it existed, but I feel comfortable now that it has been brought to light, and I trust that a large number of dedicated individuals are pouring over law texts to make sure this is within the government’s bounds. In like fashion, several states have sued the federal government in an attempt to make it divulge information about the NSA program. Now that it has been brought to light in similar manner, it can be investigated and, if necessary, altered or abolished. That is the purpose of the fourth estate. That is the purpose of the courts. I feel that both, together, will form an effective check on the far-reaching powers of the Imperial President, at least in this instance.