I find the whole kerfluffle about Osama bin Laden channeling Michael Moore and regurgitating liberal talking points rather amusing.
It's not as if liberals were given unlimited money, troops, and international support to get bin Laden--which we then pissed down an Iraqi rathole pursuing a deluded, dishonest imperial crusade in the Middle East instead.
Liberals may not believe in the war in Iraq, but we believe in catching Osama bin Laden.
Given Bush's performance, I think Michael Moore deserves his own shot at getting OBL.
Let's give Mike four-plus years, $300 billion dollars, 150,000 troops, and carte blanche to trample on individual liberties, national laws, and international treaties and see if he can smoke Osama out of his hole in remote, dangerous, oil-free Pakistan.
If any pair of nogoodniks is singing from the same hymnbook, it's George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Both of them rely on the continued imbroglio in Iraq to sustain their precarious political fortunes.
When the Shi'ites finally struggle clear of rigged elections and American resistance and kick our butts out of Iraq, they will turn around and deal with al Qaeda ruthlessly and totally (as a certain superpower has been unable to do), handing more than defeat--inflicting humiliating repudiation--to Bush and Osama.
So now Karl Rove has announced that he is going to roll the dice once again and try to turn Bush's sole proprietorship of that national security debacle known as the War on Terror into a political asset.
You can hear the frantic hammering in the liberal frame shop, as Democrats desperately worry about getting on the wrong side of the surrendering civil liberties for safety equation.
As usual, it looks like they'll screw it up and 2006 will be remembered as The Time the Democrats Tried to Make Me Care About the Fourth Amendment--and Failed.
Arguing against the expansion of the national security state is no-win, for two reasons.
First reason is that the Democrats and the American people are trapped on the wrong side of the information asymmetry equation when it comes to national security.
Bush and Rove love the national security issue, not because they're stronger and we're weaker, but because they control the story and the information and the appearance of power and strength that comes with running the secret show, and we can only guess, whimper, and basically act out of the loop, clueless, incapable--and weak.
Second reason is that Americans have dimly resigned themselves to the encroachment on their privacy, not only by the government but by corporations.
The modern state's avidity for total information awareness, in John Poindexter's immortal words, is limitless, and a bunch of 18th century constitution drafters whose concepts of data, networking, and individual privacy were shaped by the quill pen, the penny post, and the stagecoach are not going to stop it.
I can only hope the government cares about me and my information as much as my credit card company or the data mining companies who, not coincidentally, provided their extremely effective services to the government to profile potential terrorists after 9/11. If we increase oversight over the NSA, I'm sure the whole domestic surveillance business will be outsourced to some information assets corporation staffed by retired colonels and ex-spooks that will do the illegal data collection and profiling and toss names over the transom to the NSA.
I'm just waiting for my HMO to install a retinal scan and data link to my refrigerator so it can monitor my fat intake, Kraft Foods can e-mail me warnings about the dangers of falafel and French cheese, and Homeland Security can start covering my mail just to make sure they aren't letting a brie and garbanzo-crazed terrorist slip through the net.
Nobody likes increased government surveillance, but we're resigned to it, especially since if you object to it, there will be a good chance somebody will call you a traitor who's ready to let al Qaeda knock down a couple more buildings.
The correct framing for current debate should not be for or against increased government surveillance.
It should be that George Bush is doing it, without recourse to warrants.
It's whether or not unchecked power should be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a president who has shown himself unworthy of the responsibility and the nation's trust.
The good news about the warrantless surveillance brouhaha seems to be what seems to be really cheesing people off is the fact that George W. Bush is doing it, secretly and unnecessarily, and now that he got caught he's decided that he's going to brag about it as if it's a signature accomplishment of his glorious regime.
Bring 'em on.
I would posit that a president scraping along at 35% in the polls after 5 years of dismal performance and spectacular disasters should be ripe for attack.
I don't think the majority of the American people are going to buy that "politics ends at the water's edge" and "the president deserves our loyal support in time of war" crap.
Not when Bush's cat's paws have already announced their campaign slogan is going to be that the Democrats can't handle national security. Not when the president used the "war on terror" to drag us into a real and disastrous war in Iraq.
Iraq has nothing to do with national security. The more it's repackaged as a romantic democratic escapade for our freedom-loving superheroes, the further it wanders from the legal justifications voted for in the war powers resolution and the closer it skates to evidence in a bill of impeachment.
The true face of the Bush administration and how it cares about the security of Americans has been revealed in Katrina, Jack Abramoff, and the Medicare drug benefit.
In Rove-speak, we should attack Bush at his strongest point, his monopoly on the national security process and information, by simply asserting that by serial incompetence, dishonesty, and inability to acknowledge and correct his mistakes--and by his apparent intention to repeat them--he has forfeited the credibility needed to retain that monopoly.
If we handle it right, the GOP will find itself--instead of us--trapped by the national security debate as we turn the election into a referendum on George W. Bush.
When Dick Cheney snarls that they haven't hit us again because of George Bush, we should roll our eyes and say it's in spite of, not because of, George Bush.
And I think more and more people will roll their eyes with us.
Then it will be Bush and Rove, not us, who are on the wrong side of the information asymmetry equation, awkwardly piercing the classified veil by leaking secret, incomplete, unverifiable, and suspect information and backgrounders to their bespoke hacks in the media, trying to convince Americans their six hour day, vacation loving, bike riding, hurricane dodging, money grubbing part-time dim-bulb president is the only shield that stands between the nation and the horrible perils of...
...a non-imperial presidency, a professional, unpoliticized national security apparatus, and a working democracy.
Especially when we are experiencing the dismal feeling of deja vu all over again with the drumbeat for confronting Iran--a confrontation that George W. Bush's sins of omission and commission has rendered more likely.
I don't believe in the war on Iraq.
I don't even believe in the war on terror.
And I sure don't believe in the war on Iran.
I know I'm in a minority, probably of one, here, but I don't even worry that much about Iran getting the Bomb.
The non-proliferation regime has shed its goody two-shoes stance and metastasized into another element of full-spectrum dominance in which we, in an effort to enhance our strategic and tactical advantage, attempt to restrict the nuclear monopoly to the United States and its allies, and deny it to the rest of the world.
That's not necessarily a good thing. As we don't need to be reminded, in the whole bomb dropping contest, it's USA 2 Rest of the World 0. After the Russkies and the Chinese got the Bomb, we managed to struggle through the next 60 years without lighting off another one.
In other words, deterrence good, unchecked power bad.
If Teheran had nukes, maybe Israel would be more circumspect about its radical national security plan to isolate the Palestinians and conquer its adversaries by marshaling the power of the United States to destroy Arab nationalism in the Middle East politically, economically, and militarily.
And the United States might not pursuing the chimera of achieving a zero sum triumph in the Middle East by trying to eradicate Arab/Iranian nationalism through serial confrontation, destabilization, and military assault on the states that we somehow believe nurture the phenomenon, instead of feeding off it.
Iraq was supposed to elicit Shock and Awe in the region. Instead, we reaped a harvest of anger, contempt...and cool calculation, as extremists realized they were not facing an implacable, invincible foe, but a blind, blundering, and desperate opponent whose stupidity and self-delusion are only outstripped by its capacity for violence.
And now that Iran has an invasion-happy, oil-crazed superpower on their doorstep, do you think the Iranians or any objective observers are saying Gosh, Teheran sure doesn't need the Bomb? And meanwhile the Iranian government is scrambling to entrench its nuclear weapons program while our main military force is bogged down in Iraq and the West struggles to get its act together.
Now, thanks to George Bush, we lack the military capacity, deterrent, moral stature, and international credibility to deal with Iran from a position of strength.
Short of inventing time travel and campaigning on a platform of journeying back to 1945 and knock the conception-enabling third martini out of George Herbert Walker Bush's trembling hand, there is nothing we can do to return the world to those relatively halcyon days of 1999--when terrorist conspiracies were foiled through good, old-fashioned policework, the gravest threat to the nation and its constitution liberties was fellatio, and 9/11 had not made it possible for a venal, heartless, kleptocratic clique to seize control of the US government and the planet's destiny.
But we can recognize Bush's profound intellectual and moral weaknesses, and turn the political debate away from how to protect our civil liberties from the government, but how to protect our government, our armed forces, and our people from George Bush, and his eagerness to duplicate the Iraq debacle in Iran for the sake of his personal political fortunes.
We're no longer in a post 9/11 world.
We're in a post-Iraq world.
We're in a screwed up by George W. Bush world.
And if we can't remove him from the driver's seat yet, we can at least put some steadier hands on the wheel.
Therefore, I would propose that the 2006 election issue should be framed as the recognition that George Bush, through the incompetence and corruption of his regime has forfeited the privilege of receiving the benefit of the doubt on national security matters, and that balance of power, oversight, and genuine investigatory and advise and consent muscle must be restored to Congress by removing it from Republican control.
Finally, Democratic congresspeople can stop apologizing to us and the American people for voting for the Iraq war.
Instead, they can apologize for voting George W. Bush power that he did not need or deserve, and that his manifest failings as a leader have rendered him incapable of wielding properly, competently, or for the benefit of this country.
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.