"...And That I Will Preserve, Protect, and Defend The President's Ass."

It's getting darned depressing listening to the news these days. You can either listen to authoritarian media and get angry at all the things they refuse to cover, or you can listen to "left-wing" news and get angry about the things they are covering.

Today's unplesant revelation came in a broadcast of NPR's Fresh Air, who was interviewing Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. He previously earned fame covering Bush's unprecedented use of "signing statements," which Bush believes allow him to creatively misinterpret or flat-out ignore laws Congress has passed. Savage now has a book out entitled Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

The little trick Savage details here is the use of the little-known Office of Legal Counsel. This is a wing of the DOJ that researches and writes legal opinions for the President, advising him/her on the legality of programs the President may wish to implement (such as torturing prisoners of war for information, or comprehensively wiretapping the entire US citizenry without a warrant or even probable cause). Such ideas are submitted to the OLC, who then research precedent and laws on the books and render an opinion.

Well, when Bush was elected installed in 2001, the OLC was stacked with legal "scholars" who were, to put it mildly, out of their tiny little minds. Hand-picked by authoritarian extremists who bristled at the limits Congress imposed on the Presidency following the Vietnam and Watergate disasters (*cough*Cheney*cough*), these new appointees were given affirmative instructions to roll back or circumvent those limits and, "Leave the office in better shape than when he came in."

To that end, the Office of Legal Counsel has been issuing opinions that are shared by virtually no other legal scholars in the country. The opinion that said torture was okay? That was OLC's work. The opinions that said the President can wiretap anyone he damn well pleases? OLC.

The legal dodge here is that, by consulting with the OLC, the Bush League can claim they weren't going off half-cocked on their own initiative, but that they can be said to have been, "acting in good faith." "Hey, we consulted with our lawyers, we asked for their expert opinion, and they said this was okay. How could we possibly have known something was wrong with it?"

This claim is, of course, fatuous on its face. However, not being a lawyer, I have no idea how much time and energy it will take to blast through this facade of, "good faith." While consulting with the Office of Legal Counsel may lend an appearance of, "good faith," the Office itself was clearly staffed in bad faith, and all opinions rendered thereafter must therefore be tainted. Whether Congress has any recourse here aside from impeachment is unclear.

It's beginning to look as if the corruption of the DOJ has been more complete than anyone initially feared.

The Winning Hand

In Betting on 00, I described an analogy to compulsive gambling. That is certainly one way to view the Stay The Course(TM) mantra, but it is perhaps not the most charitable one. So, carrying the analogy a bit further...

Stay The Course(TM) may find its roots in the typically American belief that, "We Are Right, We Are Just, We Are Strong, and We Can Totally Kick Your Ass." Few would dispute that the US military is unmatched on the planet. Our fighting forces are the best trained and the best equipped anywhere in the world. It is inconceivable that, given an objective, the US military could not achieve it.

At least, it was inconceivable until Vietnam. It was a colossal, unmitigated failure. It proved that even the finest, most powerful tools can be misused with disasterous results.

But that's not the lesson the authoritarians took away from their failure in southeast Asia. You may have recently heard transparent attempts at revisionism, saying that we failed in Vietnam because those Dirty Fucking Hippies made us stop lose. The Liberals chickened out and made us leave lose. We didn't Stay The Course(TM). If we'd stayed, we could have won...

Every time I hear this line of "reasoning," I find myself thinking of a game of poker. One of the players -- the US -- has been dealt a winning hand, in the form of our incredible military. Four aces, royal flush, whatever you like, the pot is ours. All we have to do is get to the end of the round and rake it in.

But there are a couple of problems. First, it's a no-limit table -- the stakes can grow arbitrarily high. And second, there are at least two other people at the table. And they're batshit-crazy. They keep raising, each against the other. And that would be fine -- the pot gets bigger -- except that that's all they're doing. We keep calling, they keep raising, we call, they raise again...

You've seen the turned-up cards. You know no one else can possibly beat your hand, so could we get to the end-game, please? But no, these crazy players keep raising each other, seemingly trying to scare each other out, but it's not working, and we keep calling, waiting for the cycle of madness to end.

Eventually, we look at our wallet and realize we can't keep this up much longer. Maybe we can borrow some money -- go to Congress and ask for supplementary funding. Great, we can keep calling the raises for a while. Surely they will soon tire of this brinksmanship. But they don't. Because they're crazy. And the raises continue...

Eventually, money needed for other things is now sitting in the pot, waiting for the game to end. The entire citizenry, which hitherto had been dilligently pursuing their own interests, are now sitting with us at the table, their own fortunes also in the pot, watching and waiting for the crazy people to stop being crazy and the game to end so they can get back to their lives. And still the raises continue...

In such circumstances, when does Stay The Course become plainly ridiculous and foolhardy, even when you have the winning hand? I think our leaders are having trouble figuring that one out.

One difference, I think, is that, if we leave the table, the other players will not -- as I suspect our leaders imagine -- snigger amongst themselves and split the pot. They will keep raising against each other, unto the end of time. Our mistake was not that we left too early, or stayed too long. Our mistake was that we assumed they were playing poker when, in fact, they were playing another game entirely.

Betting on 00

This month -- September -- has been variously described by the authoritarians as the do-or-die month for the "surge" in Iraq. This is when we'll "know" whether it's working and, based on that, decide what to do next. Well, as you may have noticed, it's not working.

It was obvious that it wouldn't, of course. Out of 15 benchmarks required by Congress, only three have been met, and even then only if you stare at them just right. Report after report is coming out of Iraq saying that violence is rising, deaths are rising, refugees continue to stream out of country, and the Iraqi government exists in little more than name only.

Yet already the presses are being primed to spin one or two minor improvements in minor details as sufficient cause to Stay The Course(TM). "Just give us another Friedman Unit and then you'll really see improvement."

In other words, exactly the same rubbish we've been fed for the last four and a half years.

This whole Stay The Course mantra reminds me less of steadfast determination and more of a compulsive gambler, hovering over the roulette wheel, always betting on double-zero. Everyone around him urges him to spread his bets, cover other numbers, place an easy bet on red or black, or even move to a different game entirely. But no, he persists with double-zero.

Eventually, the ball falls on his number. Heedless of how much he has lost to get to this point, both in money and in reputation, he punches his fist in the air and victoriously proclaims, "See?? All it took was faith and determination!"

No. All it proves is that, by random chance, even an abject fool will on occasion be right.