Mukasey's radical worldview is now the norm
Bob Brock
Yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, featuring day-long
testimony from Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was extraordinary for
only one reason: for our country, what happened in the hearing is now
completely ordinary. While Mukasey may be marginally more
straightforward than Alberto Gonzales was -- more willing to conform
to the procedural formalities of independence -- he is, ideologically,
a clone of John Yoo and David Addington and is as much of a loyal
adherent to the Bush/Cheney extremist worldview as Gonzales ever was.
Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential
omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt
for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President
himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior -- including
torture -- and refused even to pretend that he cared what the Senate
thought about any of it. He even told Republican Senators that they
have no right to pass a whistleblower law allowing federal employees
who learn of lawbreaking to inform Congress about it, because such a
law would infringe on the President's constitutional powers. In
Mukasey's worldview, the President has unlimited power and Congress
has none.
And none of this is particularly surprising, given that -- as I
emphasized after his nomination was announced -- Mukasey is the
federal judge who, when presiding over the Padilla case in 2002,
endorsed the most tyrannical and un-American power there is, when he
ruled that the President even has the power to imprison U.S. citizens
indefinitely, even when detained on U.S. soil, with no process of any
kind -- a position he refused to repudiate during his confirmation
hearing.
None of what he said yesterday is extraordinary, despite how radical
and jarring it is. Mukasey repeatedly insisted that even his most
lawlessness-endorsing views are within our political mainstream, and
he's right about that. It's now been seven years that our country has
functioned under the radical executive power theories of the Bush
administration, which include the right of the President to break the
law. Congress long ago decided it would do nothing about any of it,
would acquiesce to it, and thus -- as was predictable and predicted --
it has all become normalized.
Yesterday's hearing was the most potent illustration we've seen of
that normalization. But it was potent not because anything happened
yesterday, but precisely because nothing did happen -- and nothing
will.
(...)
Strabo
Mukasey is a Zionist and Neocon. Yes, he loses face and looks like
an idiot but from his standpoint that's a small price to pay to
achieve a New World Order. Everyone has to sacrifice. All part of
the Plan.