I'll say upfront that today's column is likely to irritate some readers, because some are likely to misread it as a defense of, or at least an insufficient assault on, the Bush administration. It is neither.
Having said that, let us proceed.
A Counterpunch article -- "Impeach Now: Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy," by Paul Craig Roberts -- got a lot of blogosphere play this week. Roberts worked for the Reagan administration, was a Wall Street Journal editorial page associate editor and a contributing editor of the National Review. Not exactly the portfolio of a man inclined to call for impeachment. That alone made his article especially alluring to those who already understood the national imperative of a Bush-Cheney ouster.
But beware of citing Mr. Roberts as a thoughtful convert and ally, for a closer reading reveals a first-rate crackpot.
Let's first allow that much of what he wrote contained the unavoidably conclusive:
1) Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency....
2) Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with ... operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
3) If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct ... operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency."
4) A series of ... attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconservatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states.
5) Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be ... at war with Iran.
All perfectly sensible. Right? But the ellipses are there for good reason. I redacted the portions that destroy Roberts' seeming reasonableness in their absence -- little jewels of hysteria mixed with sobriety that strive to make the hysterical seem more sober, and the sober more properly hysterical.
Here's what's missing from the above, which I've matched numerically:
1) immediately followed by ... Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
2) again, ... false flag ...
3) and again, ... some false flag ...
4) and yet again, ... staged or permitted ...
5) ... a dictatorial police state ...
My, all that leaves one in a state of breathless panic. But let's deconstruct it a bit and see what's left of reasonable value.
There's no doubt that what Michael Chertoff said was dumb. But on viewing the Chicago Tribune interview (which I did) it's plain that his "gut feeling" comment was purely off-the-cuff, unscripted, blurted out before he gave it any thought, which, of course, was what made it so dumb for a high government official. But I too have a gut feeling we're in for some bad business. Who doesn't? True, I would try to watch my words more carefully if I were also Homeland Security Secretary, but dumb extemporaneity is nevertheless inevitable.
Furthermore, we're now going to start treating clowns like Rick Santorum as oracles of insight? After rightly belittling the man as a human geyser of the inane, we're now going to accept him as a fountain of wisdom? And even further, what Santorum actually said in a radio interview, quoted by Roberts at some distance from his "staged-event" speculation, was that "Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's going to have a very different view of this war." And "a lot of things" is a whole lot different language than "suggesting" administration-staged terrorist attacks.
Who else is among the "attentive people" whom Roberts quotes? Well, none other than the former senior editor of the John Birch Society's magazine, The New American, a credential that Roberts slyly neglects to mention. But what the good Bircher actually wrote is, once again, far different from what Roberts implied. What William Norman Grigg wrote was that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" for political reasons. About that I have no doubt. Again, who would? But it doesn't imply a "staged" strike.
Roberts also seasons his hysteria with 9/11-conspiracy-theory nonsense: "Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance." In other words: OK, all you psychoneurotics, beware of another inside job.
And his piece is imbued with even more of the clumsily frivolous:
"Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued."
An example or two perhaps? How about these?
"According to a number of writers" -- I like that; "a number of writers" -- "false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments."
True again. But what about the ones you teased us with, Mr. Roberts -- the ones you said "the US government has staged"? Why is it we instantly veered to Israel, Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany? Any competent editor or community-college writing instructor would have laughed and then blue-penciled that one right off the page.
Near the end of Roberts' piece is a profoundly accurate observation: "Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration." But only an equally diehard minority could believe that with armies of political enemies encircling it, and with a disgruntled military increasingly hostile to its imperialist fantasies, and with the absolute impossibility of a conspiratorial cabal of more than one remaining secret long enough to "stage" another 9/11 and then establish a literal "dictatorship" -- that from all this, the administration could pull off a Hitlerian coup d'état.
No, the real threat of neglecting dual impeachment was elucidated by the Nation's John Nichols and constitutional-scholar Bruce Fein on "Bill Moyers Journal" last week (transcript here). In brief, the real threat is long term: Each president accepts as s.o.p. whatever that president's predecessors managed to get away with. Corrupt and unconstitutional power is institutionalized, and its impunity feeds more of it.
Therefore the urgency of Congressionally repudiating Bush's lawless "standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society," as Mr. Fein articulated so cogently. Otherwise -- eventually, inexorably -- we will suffer an authentic "dictatorial police state."
My principal beef, however, is with the "staged-attack" hysteria and dreadfully sloppy and bumptious arguments of Mr. Roberts' ilk that serve only to make a laughingstock of the intellectual virtue of genuinely thoughtful demands for impeachment now.
