What is Dick Cheney's legacy; what is he leaving behind? (I use Cheney as shorthand for a whole raft of issues.)
I just finished reading Neal Gabler’s fascinating and chilling piece in the LA Times, The GOP's McCarthy gene. It left me thinking about the oft-mentioned (in these parts) chain of catastrophes: Watergate=>Iran-Contra=>Cheney=>what-will-it-be-next-time?
What I want to know is:
First, what is the real history of power in the executive branch -- particularly in the arena of national security -- since WWII? A complicated question, I know. What are the best sources out there for getting a handle on this? In particular, how do we calibrate our tinfoil hats to correspond to reality, in a world where COINTELPRO, secret prison ships, and rendition are real, and yet we just peacefully elected a Black man, who spent years in grassroots organizing, and whose middle name is Hussein, to the Presidency? This seems to me to be no easy task.
Second, and most importantly, what leverage points will President Obama (I do like writing that) really have -- not just to repudiate, but to decisively undermine the fitful erosion of our civil liberties, and of the constitutional checks and balances within our government, over the last 60 years or so?
On Obama, I fall somewhere in between the "he’s proving that he’s just part of the DLC hawkish corporate establishment" camp and the "OMG, he’s head-faking right so he can govern left! He’s a Jedi: Obi-Wan’s integrity; Yoda’s wisdom; Palpitine’s take-no-prisoners, long-game strategic sense; and Anakin’s passion, plus the stuff he hasn’t even shown us yet!!" camp, with a slight lean to the latter. I take as a starting point, although not an article of faith, the belief that Barack Obama has thought about all of this in some depth, and that -- whether or not he has the real power to do so, which is the question at hand in this diary -- he has the desire and intention to address these issues in a strategic fashion during his first term.
We may well be at a moment in our history as pivotal as the executive-branch-expanding years of FDR. With the rollout of Obama’s national security team, it seems an opportune time to review the fortunes of the Executive with an eye toward the future.
So I ask you, fellow Kossacks, for your perspective. Where have we been? Where do we go from here? What is to be done?
There’s another group for whom this is a critical question as well, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon:
the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin.