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regime change


New York Times US Presidential Election 2008 county map as of 5:16 AM Wednesday November 5, 2008. Colours adjusted to be brighter.

Keep in mind that the US has historically supported torture and dictatorship from Iran to Central and South America, so what was new was making it public and obvious and not apologising for it. As well, the US has historically used the IMF and World Bank to go around the world screwing up economies, so what was new was the scale of billions of dollars either handed directly to corporations in public, or mysteriously lost once they arrived in Iraq, with no consequences.

Which is to say, the past regime managed to elevate not only evil, but fiscal incompetence (or maybe fiscal indifference would be a better term). That's quite an achievement.

The single most striking thing to me out of all the last 8 years was when Bush got up and blandly said something like "yes, we have secret prisons, but they're really useful".

Setting the financial and governmental incompetence aside, I'll let Andrew Sullivan make the rest of the case for the remarkable anticonstitutional nature of the past regime

the crudeness with which military force has been deployed, the absence of strategy or even due diligence in the execution of the long war, and the massive public relations blunders which have led the United States to lose a propaganda war against a bunch of murderous, medieval loons are unforgivable.

These mistakes were compounded - and in large part created - by what I believe will one day be seen as the core event of the last eight years: the collapse of constitutional order and the rule of law fomented in a mixture of hubris and laziness by the president himself. It is now indisputable that the president and vice-president of the United States engineered a de facto coup against the constitution after 9/11, declaring themselves above any law, any treaty, and any basic moral norm in their misguided mission to rid the world of evil. ...

Cheney and Bush, unlike any presidency in American history, have dangerously pushed constitutional government to the brink of collapse. ... They did not merely act in the immediate wake of an emergency to protect American citizens swiftly - again a perfectly legitimate use of executive power, unhampered by Congress or courts. They declared such power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all. They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.

Barack Obama For President - Andrew Sullivan - November 3, 2008

To those who led and associated with the Bush-Cheney regime, I wish you only the full and fair judgment of history. Now please all SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO THE FUCK AWAY and hide in your holes or palaces awaiting whatever end of days stirs your fevered imaginations.

Labels: united states

posted by Richard at 05:38 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)