Wall Street Journal [editorial page] - March 9, 2009
Obama adopts Bush view on the powers of the presidency.
The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling.
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The Obama Justice Department has adopted a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version. It argues that the court-forced disclosure of the surveillance programs would cause "exceptional harm to national security" by exposing intelligence sources and methods. Last Friday the Ninth Circuit denied the latest emergency motion to dismiss, again kicking matters back to Judge Walker.
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Which demonstrates, once again, the accuracy of Zizek's six year old insight into the real danger posed by the Bush administration's modification of executive branch SOP.
No doubt, I've mentioned this before. But I forgive myself. Our brief lives consist mostly of contending leitmotifs.
THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?
Link - <http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>
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We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
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.d.
-- "I am Hannah Freakin' Montana and I didn't have to take this."
Miley Freakin' Cyrus
.............................. http://monroelab.net/blog/