In a new piece at TomDispatch, David Swanson and Tom Englehardt do a good job of encapsulating the continuity that has become the hallmark of our so-called Age of Change. The title says it all: "Bush's Third Term? You're Living It." It is a very thorough and detailed demolition job; but the roots of the corruption go much deeper than the current administration – or the last one.

But first, a few excerpts (though do go and read the whole piece, especially for the copious links):

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it... There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed,” and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world… And of course, he would have held onto his secretary of defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan….

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

During Bush’s second term, some of the lowest-ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush’s third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad-apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
 

There is much more in this vein, as the authors skillfully morph Barack into the spitting image of Bush.

But of course, in many ways, we are not really living through Bush's third term, but the 16th term of the National Security State that was founded by secret presidential directives during Harry Truman's second term. Beginning with the ur-document, NSC-68, these directives mandated a thoroughgoing militarization of the American state, complete with vast secret forces specifically designed to carry out criminal actions – subversion, coups, "black ops," break-ins, kidnappings, torture, assassination programs, gruesome medical experiments: "the dark side, if you will." Not that things were all peaches and cream before then, of course; just ask the Filipinos (or the Cherokee, or the slaves, etc.) But in 1951, the new National Security State raised the war machine budget by 400 percent in a single year. And it has never looked back, not even after the collapse of the Soviet Union – the ostensible reason for devouring the lifeblood and seed-corn of the nation and giving it to war profiteers. As we noted here a couple of years ago:

[NSC-68] constituted the re-founding of the country as a "National Security State," controlled by the military-industrial complex and driven by a nightmare vision of exaggerated threats, craven fear, secrecy and deception, bellicosity and brinkmanship. This vision has waxed and waned in intensity at various times over the years, but it has never been displaced as the central dynamic of American power. The demonic, all-powerful enemy has now morphed from the Soviet Union to Islamic extremism, but the paranoid rhetoric and "Pentagon uber alles" philosophy of the Cold War has been seamlessly transferred whole cloth to the supposedly transformed "post-9/11 age."

Indeed, these fanatical tropes are encoded in the very genetic structure of the National Security State. As NSC-68 itself says:

"The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."

Substitute "islamofascism" for the Soviet Union, and you suddenly reading Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens, Dick Cheney – or the lates dispatches from Hillary Clinton's State Department.

What's more, consider for a moment that the above passage from NSC-68 was written just five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Did these mandarins – most of them "liberal" Democrats at the time, by the way – really believe that the previous aspirant to hegemony, Adolf Hitler, was not animated by a fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and eager to impose his authority over world affairs? That the Soviet Union represented the eruption of some unique evil, whose threat justified any crime, any atrocity, any gutting of liberty? Just five years after the Holocaust, after the deaths of 40 million people (20 million in the Soviet Union alone)? The late David Halberstam, who quotes the passage in his remarkable last book, The Coldest Winter, points out the chilling fact that the NSC-68 was a top-secret document, intended only for the eyes of the very highest poobahs; it was not a propaganda piece designed to snow the rubes.

Here we have a glimpse into one of the central processes which lead human beings to perpetrate inhuman slaughter and suffering: the self-hypnosis by which elites convince themselves of the absolute righteousness of their own barbaric urge for domination – and the absolute, irredeemable evil of those who stand in their way.

In any case,  there is nothing new or unusual in Obama's "continuity." It has been the very air we've breathed for generations –a fetid, poisonous, cancerous vapor. Still, it is always salutary to have reality delineated as clearly as possible as often as possible. After all, someone must tell the children – and the millions of adult "progressives" who evidently have to re-learn these harsh lessons after every electoral victory for "hope" and "change."
 

Comments (15)

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Bruce F said:

	'Change' in pictures Another excellent piece, Chris. In the same vein is this bit of agitprop. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/SRxCflHw5hI/AAAAAAAACN0/3UrHnGaUZ7g/s1600-h/Bush-Obama+s.jpg
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Sean O'Neil said:

	... nice of Swanson and Engelhardt to put this together. hopefully the idea of Bush's Third Term will open some minds. excellent work extending the idea to an actual 16th term of the National Security State -- especially that statistic from 1951. bueno.
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wildsilver said:

... Hi there, really appreciate your work, In view of NSC-68 it's clear the coup to sieze the White House went ahead after all, even though it didn't make the front pages. We know evil doesn't sleep and I guess that's how they get away with it. Smedley Butler never knew rock 'n roll but I'm sure he's spinning in his grave right now. When these twats are on their deathbeds I'm sure they won't be wishing they'd spent more time being arseholes. Cheers, Barry

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September 03, 2009
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mjose said:

... A fine, powerful post - showing the continuity of the "supersytem" - OK, my term that I flog mercilessly, just for the fun of it. Yet here is David Swanson, going on a national tour to promote his book about taking back this or that or "progressive" this or that. He was media director or snackfood director for Dennis Kucinich, the same ascetic guru who, with a straight and earnest face, talked about a "Kucinich administration" as he was giving Barack Obama such a mighty, might contest for Presidency of the Empire. When we do hold sober adults accountable for continuing to smoke on such pipe dreams?

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Sean O'Neil said:

mjosef -- I agree with you there I agree about Swanson often being busy promoting himself and some of his more lame-brained ideas. On this point of Bush's Third Term, however, he seems to be coming to grips with reality. Kucinich is no salve for what ails America. Kucinich is the Congress's "token radical" and he's there for distraction purposes only. Swanson seems mighty proud of his time with Kucinich, doesn't seem able to understand what Kucinich's effective role is. If Kucinich actually had behaved on impeachment as Mike Gravel did on the Pentagon Papers or the draft, I might think Kucinich more worthy of the praise showered on him by Swanson. But as it is, I think Swanson's just hitching his wagon to Kucinich's and tagging along. We should be grateful he has this area of insight on the essay discussed by Mr Floyd here -- he may yet see the light.

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September 03, 2009
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Jimmy Montague said:

	It's getting uglier by the hour outside. Millions of people are waking up to the fact that Obama has screwed them. Too bad summer's almost gone.
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John Puma said:

Who DID win WWII ? The more I understand about this country the more it appears that either our "victory" over Hitler forever after contaminated us to subsume and further his "vision" or we got into the war, and "won," because we saw him beginning to intrude on what we considered our turf. Consider the "February 1948 in a top-secret U.S. State Department document, known as Policy Planning Staff memorandum 23, which defined U.S. post-war policy in Asia, focusing in particular on Japan and the Philippines. The policy paper had been drafted by George Kennan, the first director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. Kennan wrote: 'We [Americans] have 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of the population. This disparity is particularly great between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. ... We should cease to talk about vague, and for the Far East, unreal objectives, such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.' " http://www.counterpunch.org/jensenpain.html)

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Sean O'Neil said:

... Jimmy - it's startling to compare now to one month ago, when all the Praise Obama flags were flying madly. John Puma - WW2 created big lessons for American politicians. Karl Rove duplicated Josef Goebbels' tactics in rhetoric and in "homeland security" aspects. 9/11/2001 was our Reichstag Fire. I don't think Germany "won" so much as it provided a classroom or laboratory for fascism. Rove merely removed the taint of fascism and made it about something else.

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John Puma said:

To Sean O'Neil My point is that our apparent descent began virtually immediately after WWII. The above-described "NSC-68 was written just five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany" while the Kennan quote I provided was from 1948. These documents, and I'm sure there are others, define and describe our foreign policy quite well for the ensuing 60+ years. They are hardly policies and sentiments that I associate with our "self-image." (Of course, this just means that one, or more, of those yet-to-be-revealed post WWII policy documents probably outlines how a robust PR can be a great shield.) Clearly Rove has duplicated a great deal of the Nazi tactics/rhetoric but he did not start the process any more than the Reichstag Fire was day one of the German descent.

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Sean O'Neil said:

I agree, John. I think Mr Floyd traced it back very well. I would trace it back to the 12 year interim between 1776 and 1787, and would point to the radical differences between the driving forces underlying the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. A lot of what develops in any human society depends on how those who organize the society view humanity. Those who see other humans as enemies to be vanquished or controlled, their society will look like ours today, or like Nazi Germany was in Hitler's time. I find it interesting that while the USA is screaming at high speed toward dictatorship of the most malignant sort, many South American countries are seeing the need to view fellow humans as potential fellows, and not as enemies.

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Steven Jardine said:

	... I'm not sure but it sounds like business as usual. This nation is on the slide to what Chris and Shock Doctrine have been saying. I'm long on beans, rice, and ? A sad day in Amerika the humans here and around the world didn't earn this. It's been brought to you by ? jo6pac
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BILL LAWRENCE said:

	... Then again, maybe GW Bush is still running the country. He was conniving enough to realize that the evangelicals could put him in the white house if he pretended to believe. Why not cynical enough to think that the sheep are ready to follow a smooth talking black shepherd.
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Bill Jones said:

	"The demonic, all-powerful enemy has now morphed from the Soviet Union to Islamic extremism" Yeah, it took them a little while to think up a threat that could be presented as "Global" Penny-ante villains like Milosevic were good practice for the death machine but couldn't reasonably be presented as justification for $1 Trillion of annual looting.
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DeanTaylor said:

We lost it Ben... "As Benjamin Franklin was exiting after writing the U.S. constitution, a woman asked him 'Sir, what have you given us?.' He replied, 'A republic ma'am, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT'" [Wiki; stress added]. That exchange occured at appoximately 1:30 PM. By five o'clock the soon-to-be-lamented ideals of the republic had deteriorated into Empire--i.e., the noble "experiment" had gone awry. As rightly remarked here, "A lot of what develops in any human society depends on how those who organize the society view humanity." Quite so. One hastens to add the operative term "all," i.e., ALL of humanity, and not solely the white, male, financially viable, non-papist investor clique by whom we had established our first polity. As Chomsky reminds us, this country is the ONLY political entity that BEGAN life as an Empire, e.g., Rome, Britain, the Ottomans, etc., adopted that benevolent persona by and by... And, the notion of "straight power concepts" as espoused by Kennan in the forties enjoyed a much earlier incarnation with, e.g., the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, the Trail of Tears, the annexing of Hawai'i, etc. That Kennan, a seasoned statesman--who generally compels high marks in certain circles for, e.g., for his having latterly condemned the Viet Nam holocaust--assumed its announcement was a hapax legomena cannot be attributed to benign naiveté or a one-off lapse in Kennanesque reason. Any supposition of "misstatement" falters, considering our country's narrative, and is more correctly viewed as culpable ignorance--at best. And, at worst, it was a re-stating--a reestablishing?--of the tenets of Empire as manifest early on. As Chris has it: "the self-hypnosis by which elites convince themselves of the absolute righteousness of their own barbaric urge for domination." And yet, to sustain this Empire necessitated a "self-hypnosis" on a grander scale. The early beneficiaries of Empire's largesse did not scruple to condemn the provenance of ill-gotten gain--as long as they were on the receiving end of the deal, as opposed to the receiving end of the lash. Like a colossal Ponzi scheme promising too-good-to-be-true returns, the new invitees were not merely loathe to condemn the murderous appropriation of Native American lands, i.e., the fount of political gift-giving and patronage. In many cases, they forbore to even look too hard at the matter. And THAT "sin of omission," as it were--i.e., the seemingly benign act of BEING WILLING TO LOOK AWAY--multiplied across the collective, helps to sustain what many here are wishing--albeit, possibly too late--would be undone. Said another way: once we looked away WE were undone. Power exists in a "top down" hierarchical construct, implying exclusion, inequity, etc., to whatever degree, great or small. If we, as the collective, suffer no real compunction about having Bob or Bill or Nancy "below" us--WHOEVER they are and WHEREVER they reside: lesbian, kike, papist, gook, Pashtun, nigger, white trash--i.e., their having been the victims of the Ponzi/Empire inequity, then "we" are Empire. It will ALWAYS be the case that some megalo-maniac will come down the pike, look us in the eye, and say, with no small solemnity, "Let me lead you," to which the Sheeple intone, "Lead us." Meanwhile, the last fifty leaders had brought the Sheep to the doors of the abattoir, closing them just in time to leave enough of an "an electorate" for the next "leader." The current satrap--whoever he or she is--is not the dominant issue, althought subpoenas, censure, etc., are surely warranted. Generally speaking we reaped what we sowed--and how could it POSSIBLY be otherwise? In referring to our scenario, I use the term collective, as the word "nation" would seem to imply a certain cohesion. With Empire/Ponzi it's every man for himself. There is no cohesion with Empire. There inheres a crazed, disparate collective pulling in many directions at once, yet always tending towards the abattoir. If Lord Acton was right: "Power corrupts, and absolute Power...," and we as Empire are dealing in "straight Power concepts"--as we most surely have been all along, then we are most certainly reprobate. And, if there is anything to "salvage" in the end it will be owing to direct resistance of Empire--NOT direct commentary. "Sir, what have you given us?." [Franklin] replied "A republic ma'am, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT." Where is the lapse in what is forfeited?

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Sean O'Neil said:

Good points, Dean. I liked this brief observation, which says a lot more than its few words seem to do on their surface: With Empire/Ponzi it's every man for himself. I have noticed in my small town, over the past 5 years, a startling increase in selfishness. I see it in grocery stores where people hurry to jump in front of someone at the merest gap in line. I see it when 15 cars blast through a red traffic signal as if it were still green, holding up the opposite flow's green signaled permission to move. I see it in people driving down the road, talking on a cell phone and eating food - instead of paying attention to the other drivers, pets in the street, children on bikes. We are in a frightening period of rank selfishness. I assume this is due to fear and uncertainty, but even if those causes are really the reason, that's no excuse for the behavior. It only helps identify the cause, it doesn't change the impact of the behavior upon all in the vicinity of that selfish action. At our Federal Government level, the rule displayed by the actions of the govt is this: it's all about me, and I'm gonna get what I can, and I don't care who I have to step on or inconvenience in the process! That's the sentiment behind the "bailouts" and the current clusterfuggle on health care. Mr Obama is bailing out his corporate sponsors, to enrich himself and them, at the expense of the rest of us. It baffles me to wonder why people continue to point to Obama as some sort of noble, pure man of the people. He is nothing of the sort. As far as I have been able to discern, he never was that sort of man -- not once he finished law school and found that sycophancy for the rich and powerful was a path to his own riches and power. More bothersome is the fact that he covers this callous selfishness in a sort of unctuous rhetoric that has just enough "hope and change" tenor to gull a whole lot of folks who had no problem seeing selfish greed in Messrs Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Libby, Gonzales, Ashcroft, et alia. While I often remark that Obama's half-Black status is part of the reason why he gets away with his callous greed behind a fascia of populism, I don't think that explains the whole thing. I think it's just that people's selfishness extends beyond those in power to those who are being raped and abused by that power. Their selfishness is a bit more benign, it seems to be revealed in a selfish desire to not be wrong about Obama. Or the flip side, a selfish desire to be on the winning team (Democrats). As Jimmy Montague and Grandma Jefferson have observed repeatedly here, it seems this must play out to the horrible, possibly bloody conclusion. I wish that weren't true, but I find no reason to think it will turn out otherwise.

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