Dictator in Chief?
Posted: Friday, May 25, 2007 11:00 AM by Countdown
Some of what we're working on for tonight...
With no press conferences, and with no debate, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic "event" under which he has entrusted himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the executive branch. The scheme, laid out in a document entitled
National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20 that Mr. Bush signed in secret on May 9.
It defines a catastropic event as "any incident,
regardless of location, that results in extraordinary
levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption
severely affecting the U.S. population,
infrastructure, environment, economy, or government
functions." That would mean another 9/11, Hurricane
Katrina, a bad day on Wall Street, an upcoming
election, you name it. Sorry, he names it. As for
claiming the right to run roughshod over the other
branches of government, U.S. Constitution be damned,
the document pays lip service to the need for "a
cooperative effort among the executive, legislative,
and judicial branches of the Federal Government" but
says this effort would be "coordinated by the
President."
All in all, a document that would seem to be the paper
equivalent of reserving the right for a dictatorial
coup. Augusto Pinochet would be proud.
THE MORNING AFTER To many, it no doubt feels like a hangover
without having partied the night before. What happened still almost
defies explanation. What the Washington Post calls "
a historical rarity:
the passage of a bill opposed by the speaker of the House and a
majority of the speaker's party." And yet pass the Iraq war funding
bill did, by a vote of 280-142 in the House and by 80-14 in the Senate.
Even stranger, of the 16 senators who voted against going to war to
begin with in 2002, 11 voted last night to give President Bush whatever
he wants.
Hillary Clinton, among the senators whose votes switched in the
opposite direction. Having voted for the war resolution in '02, last
night, she was among the small majority to vote against it. (GOP
strategists, already salivating over the attack ad possibilities, no
doubt.) Mrs. Clinton, it should be noted, waited until after Barack
Obama voted to cast her ballot... thereby keeping her voting record on
the conflict in line with her main opponent's.
A new poll in
the New York Times showing that, on Iraq, the Democrats and the White House are seriously misreading the mood of the American public.
CHOW CHOWS OF WAR
It seems a bird didn't just crap on the president's
arm at yesterday's news conference in the Rose Garden,
it also crapped all over his attempt to threaten the
children of reporters who dared to ask tough
questions. As our own
Dana Milbank points out (as part
of his day job at the Washington Post) Mr. Bush's
warning that Al Qaeda is a threat to the children of
NY Times correspondent Jim Rutenberg failed to take
one thing into account: "Rutenberg has no children,
only a brown chow chow named Little Bear."
