Revisionist history and memory formation on the Cheney-Bush Administration

His failure in his duty to see that the crimes of the Cheney-Bush regime - especially the torture program - were fully investigated and prosecuted according to the law is the most significant contribution of his Administration to creating the condition that would up with Donald Trump in the White House.

And now Bush gets to play the kindly elder stateman, to the sycophantic praise of not only NeverTrumper Republicans but also by Democrats who are afraid or unwilling to fight for their own side.

A Message from President George W. Bush@TheCalltoUnite pic.twitter.com/FIn9wuOPTF

— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) May 2, 2020

George W. Bush kept the Republican Party on its path to authoritarianism and accelerated it.

Rodayah Chamseddine's Rehabilitating a Monster: George W. Bush and the Bankruptcy of Civility Politics In These Times 09/6/2018 maintains its relevance.

... a former president, who oversaw an apocalyptic shock and awe campaign, was rehabilitated as a homely and wholesome painter. George W. Bush, whose administration wantonly poisoned Iraq with nearly 10,000 rounds of depleted uranium, and gave license to torture and indefinite incarceration without due process in offshore detention sites like the notorious Guantánamo Bay, was invited last year to sit across from Ellen DeGeneres and share self-deprecating barbs with Jimmy Kimmel to the benefit of his promotional book tour. Missing were the images of children suffering the aftermath of U.S.-made radioactive weaponry and the haunting photographs of Iraqi men languishing in Abu Ghraib. There was no meaningful discussion of the global surveillance apparatus that targeted and racialized Muslims. The body politic has not even come to terms with the full extent of this bloodbath. One would think that history would have long destroyed any semblance of nostalgia for George W. Bush, but the political fanfiction abounds—in spite of it. [my emphasis]

Another former President, Jimmy Carter, is someone whose post-Presidential contributions to American public life and to the cause of international peace I regard as more constructive and important than those of his Presidency. Carter talked about the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture program in his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005):

Physicians for Human Rights reported in April 2005 that "at least since 2 002, the United States has been engaged in systematic psychological torture" of Guantanamo detainees that has "led to devastating health consequences for the individuals subjected to" it. The prisoners' outlook on life was not improved when the Secretary of Defense declared that most of them would not be released even if they were someday tried and found to be innocent. ...

The terrible pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have brought discredit on our country. This is especially disturbing, since U.S. intelligence officers estimated to the Red Cross that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees at this prison were held by mistake. Military officials reported that at least 108 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other secret locations just since 2002, with homicide acknowledged as the cause of death in at least 28 cases. The fact that only one of these was in Abu Ghraib prison indicates the widespread pattern of prisoner abuse, certainly not limited to the actions or decisions of just a few rogue enlisted persons.

Iraqi major general Abed Hamed Mowhoush reported voluntarily to American officials in Baghdad in an attempt to locate his sons, and was detained, tortured, and stuffed inside a green sleeping bag, where he died from trauma and suffocation on November 26, 2003.

The superficial investigations under the auspices of the Department of Defense have made it obvious that no high-level military officers or government officials will be held accountable, but there is no doubt that their public statements and private directives cast doubt and sometimes ridicule on the applicability of international standards of human rights and the treatment of prisoners. [my emphasis]

That was 2005. After two full Bush-Cheney Administrations, two full Obama-Biden Administration, and over three years of the Trump Administration, the disgrace that is the prison in Guantanamo is still in operation. And the legal cases against the prisoners that have been there since the Bush Administration are still not all resolved.

My Scrooge-ish take on the NeverTrumpers

One phenomenon of the Trump era that I may never be able to grasp is the appeal of the group of hardcore, rightwing, warmongering Republicans known as NeverTrumpers.

Jennifer Rubin has a high public profile among politically engaged Democrats due to her regular Washington Post column. In Don’t torture yourself with the clown show Washington Post 03/22/2020, she argues, "It is only in the disastrous Trump era that we have been bludgeoned by ignorance, cruelty, incompetence and narcissism on an unprecedented scale."

That is an argument that I wouldn't make in the way she does. And it's a reminder of how the political establishment of both parties and the corporate media in general failed to seriously process the implications of the Bush-Cheney Administration with its serious crimes and abuses.

I've been re-reading Al Gore's 2007 book The Assault on Reason. He was engaging in real time with that Administration's policies. It's surprisingly hard going. Not because the writing is difficult to follow, on the contrary. The problem is that I can't make it through a whole chapter in one sitting, because it's stunning to remember how cosmically bad that Administration was.

Think about what was involved: the Iraq War, the bungled Afghanistan War, Guantanamo, Abu Ghuraib and "special rendition" and John Yoo (aka, criminal torture), the total ignoring of the Al-Qaida threat in 2001, John Ashcroft, Halliburton, Katrina.

With the Iraq War in the mix, I wouldn't say that Trump has yet reached the Shrub Bush level of cruelty, incompetence, etc.

But be that as it may, that horror show of a government was creating clear precedents for the worst practices of Trump's scary clown show of a government. People like Gore and John Dean were saying clearly at the time what kind of horrendous precedents Bush and Cheney and their whole crew were creating.

Take this current very legitimate concern as an example. The current Attorney General, William Barr, served in the first Bush Administration, where he was already in favor of packing the jails full. (Sagiv Galai, William Barr Was an Ardent Champion of Mass Incarceration ACLU.org 01/10/2019) Now he's asking for more power to keep people in jail without charges, aka, preventive detention, using the COVID-19 crisis as justification, as Betsy Woodruff Swan reports (Politico DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic 03/21/2020):

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States. ...

The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus — the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.

“Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest,’” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.” [my emphasis]

Here is what Gore wrote in his 2007 book:

... the diminished role of individuals in America's national conversation has been accompanied by a diminished respect for the rights of individuals- especially during the Bush-Cheney administration.

For example, President Bush has declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen whom he alone determines to be a threat to our nation- without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, and without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. The president claims that he can simply snatch an American citizen off the street and keep him or her locked up indefinitely - even for the rest of his or her life- and refuse to allow that citizen the right to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer even to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. [my emphasis in bold]

Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft, who like Barr was a Christian dominionist who disdained separation of church and state, infamously used the aftermath of the 2001 9/11 attack, followed by an unrelated shooting spree in the Washington area by two men and the never-fully-explained mailings of anthrax powder to politicians and media offices, to get a grab-bag of increased surveillance and police powers enacted which was basically a wish-list of measures of things the Justice Department wanted anyway.

This history forms my own view of the NeverTrumper schtick. Which starts from the fact that NeverTrumpers particularly visible in the press such as Rubin, Max Boot, Butcher's Bill Kristol, David "Bobo" Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, Michael Gerson, are rightwing Republicans. They are not people who had some kind of "Road to Damascus" conversion in which they became aghast at the loyal support for the Bush-Cheney Administration and its horrible precedents. The main impulse for the "NeverTrumper" crew was Trump's seeming departures from hawkish Republican war policies, as illustrated by this joint statement of various conservative foreign policy figures from March 2016, Open Letter on Donald Trump From GOP National Security Leaders War on the Rocks 03/02/2016.

So why do some Democrats who don't necessarily identify with their rightwing policy positions find NeverTrumper arguments attractive? It seems to me several factors are at work. One is the novelty factor, which weighs heavily with the favorable media reception of the NeverTrumpers. The NTers are making "counterintuitive" arguments, something the media loves, i.e., they are professed rightwing Republicans arguing against the rightwing Republican President.

But why do Democrats find their arguments attractive? Here are my thoughts at this point.

As Republicans, the NT's have a kind of "insider" credibility.

They insist on what would be nice to believe, that Trump is a bizarre aberration who will soon give way to a restored normalcy. Rubin writes, "Though so much is uncertain and our lives have been put on pause, we will hold elections in November. We will be able to replace Trump and his exasperating band of buffoonish advisers."

They often stress broad (classical) liberal principles like the rule of law and respect for institutions.

The Democratic leadership really has since the Reagan years gotten comfortable with a "duck-and-cover" approach. Part of that, as George Lakoff has described at length, is that Democrats are sorely tempted to adopt Republican "framing" on major issues. Or simply conceding the framing to Republicans are try to argue against a Republican worldview by stressing facts but not distinguishing a progressive, Democratic worldview/framing. (Patt Morrison, Linguist George Lakoff on what Democrats don’t understand — and Republicans do — about how voters think Los Angeles Times 11/22/2018) The NeverTrumpers give centrist Democrats anti-Trump arguments prepackaged in Republican framing.

And, let's be blunt, a not-insignificant number of Democratic voters support the more hawkish worldview of the NeverTrumpers. It's worth noting that the "neoconservative" foreign policy mode of thinking was heavily influenced by Democratic Party "Cold War liberalism," notably that of Washington Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. The post-1989 political world saw the emergence of a strong "humanitarian hawk" view within the Democratic Party associated with foreign policy figures like Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power. This provided some combination of conviction and political cover that led Democratic Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry to vote in support of the Iraq War in 2002, a disastrous war whose results were far from being humanitarian.

The Democratic Party is the center-left party of the US and has traditionally was the pro-labor party. But - at least prior to the COVID-19 crisis and the beginning recession! - has not been doing politics in a country where Franklin Roosevelt once famously saw "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." (“One Third of a Nation”: FDR’s Second Inaugural Address History Matters) Poverty is obviously a very persistent problem! But a key part of the Democrats' current voting base are affluent city-dwellers and suburbanites, sometimes referred to with the (to me) awkward term "professional-management class (PMC)". These voters tend to be more liberal on formal freedoms like voting rights and women's rights. But many of them are also comfortable with conservative economics, including corporate-deregulation "free trade" treaties and to the rhetoric of "humanitarian hawks".

For some Democrats, the NeverTrumper way of thinking will be an "gateway drug" to becoming, uh, Republicans.

A couple of concluding comments on the NTers. The driving concern of the NeverTrumpers has been their concern that his foreign policy was insufficiently warlike and/or too incompetent at trying to start wars. (On the latter, see Susan Glasser, The Trials of a Never Trump Republican New Yorker 03/23/2020: "Trump has done plenty of things the old Republican foreign-policy establishment would cheer for, if someone else were doing them.") The NTers are Iraq War Republicans. And the Iraq War is what catastrophe looks like.

Which means they are Dick Cheney Republicans. Which is why the prefer to give the impression that they came out of some clean, respectably democratic and responsible Republican Party which went astray with a strange and unprecedented character named Donald Trump. But the Trumpist of 2016-2020 would not have been possible without the Cheney-Bush Republican Party of 2001-2009. That's what the Republican Party still is. The NeverTrumpers just want a slightly more respectable-sounding Dear Leader. And, yes, much of the Republican adoration of Shrub Bush was the same kind of cringe-worthy Dear Leader idolatry that today's Republicans give to the Malicious Orange Clown.

My bottom line: NeverTrumpers, bah, humbug!

The authoritarian trend during the Cheney-Bush Administration

The main thing that concerns me about the liberal enthusiasm over NeverTrumper conservatives criticizing Trump is that it tends to obscure the extent that the whole Republican Party has been pushing an authoritarian style of politics for a long time. It's been a habit of liberals for decades to point to conservatives from 10 or 20 years before and use their words or positions as criticisms of conservatives in the present moment. It's a standard political ploy for conservatives to do the same with liberals of earlier decades. It's noarmally more stock polemics than real analysis.

There's a market for authoritarian ideas and has been for a long time. The "Studies in Prejudice "directed by Max Horkheimer highlighted that trend in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That set of studies built on the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) from the Frankfurt School Horkheimer directed.

Historian Richard Hofstadter - who still seems to be the only expert on authoritarian movements in America that many TV pundits have heard of - wrote in his famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (Harper's, Nov 1964):

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture - it is no more than that - that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

Joe Conason did a book published in 2007 titled It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Here an excerpt from the review I did of it (Contradiciones (Original) 02/24/2007), with minor spelling corrections:

Conason skillfully describes how the toxic combination of lazy and compliant reporters, the extreme governmental secrecy that is a hallmark of Cheney's style of rule, corporate media dominance, and actual government-sponsored propaganda have combined to cripple the functioning of an independent press that is a critical element of democracy. He calls atttention to a trend in the Republican Party toward advocating overt censorship, still alarmed as they are about the amount of genuine journalism still being practiced in the US. He calls special attention to an article by Gabriel Schoenfeld, Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? Commentary March 2006, which lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation.

Conason creates a useful framework in which to view the authoritarian tilt of the Republican Party under the Cheney-Bush administration, from ideological organizations like the Federalist Society (which promotes corporatist legal doctrine) to the effect of having an atmosphere of permanent war. The latter is essential for Dick Cheney's program of authoritarian rule, because only with such a climate of fear and threat can the Cheney policies of preventive war, torture, massive spying and an Executive not bound by any laws completely supplant the legal and Constitutional practices of the old Republic.

The Cold War provided such a framework, too. And in his concluding chapter, Conason fills in the dots leading from the Nixon administration's police-state measures known collectively as "Watergate" and the Reagan administration's secret war program which is best known through the Iran-Contra scandal to the Cheney methods of authoritarian governance which permeate the current administration.

Understanding the roots of the current situation in the darkest side of the Nixon administration is important because, as he writes, "[m]ost Americans, even those who lived through the Nixon era, have forgotten the context - let alone the details - of the Watergate scandal." He also observes, "The parallels are striking, but the difference is that Bush, Cheney, and Rove, and the forces they represent, are far more developed and powerful than the Nixon gang ever was." (my emphasis)

Though he doesn't mention it in the book, this illustrates the need for something like a Truth Commission process after Cheney and Bush are out of power. Not only do we need prosecution of crimes committed - and there have been many - but we also need a process by which the abuses of this administration can be publicly aired and understood. We need to make it far harder for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who learned their governing principles and style from the worst aspects of the Nixon administration, to come to power 10, 20, 30 years down the line determined to succeed where Cheney, Rummy, Karl Rove and the rest will hopefully have failed. The criminal and antidemocratic practices of the Cheney-Bush Administration need to be thoroughly discredited.

That perspective is the basis of my main criticism of the Obama Administration, which is they did not thoroughly investigate those crimes. I'm not talking about the "Lock Her Up!" type of criminalizing political opponents. Whether through the Justice Department, a Special Prosecutor, or some sort of Truth Commission, a real professional investigation should have taken place and appropriate prosecutions under the law should have been carried out as a result.

Conason mentions the Gabriel Schoenfeld article that, as I put it then, "lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation." The main target in his article was James Risen, then a reporter for the New York Times and now with The Intercept. The article made the case that Risen should be prosecuted for revelations in his book State of Siege and in the New York Times. As his Intercept bio explains:

Risen was himself a target of the U.S. government’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. He waged a seven-year battle, risking jail, after the Bush administration and later the Obama administration sought to force him to testify and reveal his confidential sources in a leak investigation. Risen never gave in, and the government finally backed down. (my emphasis)

Risen described his legal ordeal early this year in The Biggest Secret The Intercept 01/03/2018:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves. (my emphasis)

In other words, the Obama Administration's policy was not just to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" on those crimes. In the kind of legal actions against the press and whistleblowers that Conason rightly warned about during the Cheney-Bush Administration, it was the Obama Administration that applied that next level of authoritarian media regulation. (See also: James Risen, All the News Unfit to Print Intercepted 01/03/2018; Pete Vernon, James Risen’s press freedom battles with Bush, Obama, and The New York Times Columbia Journalism Review 01/03/2018)

But, of course, the drivers of the authoritarian trend in US politics for decades have been the Republican Party, Christian Right fundamentalists, far right groups, woman-hating "men's rights activists," militarists, hate radio, and assorted racists, white supremacists, "Patriot" Militia types, and conspiracy theorists.

On the other hand, Obama proved dramatically that look-forward-not-backwards policies by Democratic Admimistrations will not reverse the authoritarian trends.