Banality, Hubris et al.

I need to take a moment from an otherwise spiffy day and get a few things off my chest. This labor is obviously futile, but none the less it provides the illusion of getting something done without being as difficult as, say, sifting through a long list of citations and making sure that everything is correct.

Mark Thursday Feb 7th as a Very Interesting Day. As the core of much of this has been covered already, I will simply quote someone smarter and more articulate than I:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is back on the Hill today, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. Paul Kiel is covering it at TPMmuckraker.

So far, he's dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration's warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

This is really the height of lawyer fetishism which seems to have gripped the current administration. I am using the term here as a nice way of referring to the uncomfortable fact that the political appointees who seem willing to discuss the moral relativism of torture in such a way that Derrida blush are the ones who are making the decisions about what constitutes legality.

As a later update clarifies, it is not just that they can 'ignore' the law by saying that some act or another is ok. There is no legal recourse - criminal or civil - within the United States systems of law once the DOJ says okie-dokie.

The white house needs more lawyers and more opinions in order to normalize the unspeakable, the Banality of Evil. Yet when the smoke clears, Evil still will have been done. They would like to normalize there actions to the degree that it is ok to openly admit such acts without shame. Waterboarding is not torture, not illegal if we say so. Not quite true. Never will be. Jack Balkin notes:

Actually, it violates the law whether or not you call it illegal. Generally speaking, war criminals don’t usually admit that they have engaged in war crimes. They usually say they were justified in acting as they did.

A line has been passed in that all the cards seem to be on the table now. This is a big deal, and we need to force the two democratic (and yes, also our republican) candidates to answer the question of exactly what they are going to do about the executive branch. I, naturally took this idea from here:

This is the only issue in the presidential campaign. It is the only truly existential threat to the country. Everything else -- health care, climate change, campaign finance, the deficit -- mean nothing if we fail on this fundamental issue.

This reminds me of a quote that has already appeared here but which rings more truthfully now that when I first heard it. The authoritarian fascist will come up to you and say exactly what they are going to do long before they do it:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way that the world works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

The first time that I read that all I thought was 'what a pompous asshole.' I am wondering if this is a case of significantly underestimating (for lack of a better term) our opposition.

I am not completely sure what our Reality Based Community can or should do. This is a complex and real problem with ramifications that could last for generations. I go now to make some noodles and play out in the glorious sunshine with PAB. There is much to think about.