{"id":175853,"date":"2020-11-10T23:44:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T04:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/10\/true\/"},"modified":"2020-11-10T23:44:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-11T04:44:00","slug":"true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/11\/10\/true\/","title":{"rendered":"True"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world<\/a>:<\/p>\n

That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy \u2014 a longing, a desire, a craving \u2014 has long been obvious. <\/p>\n

The Democrats\u2019 own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler \u2014 from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase <\/a>The Fascist Dictator\u2019s domestic spying powers<\/a> and military spending<\/a> to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

I began writing about politics in 2005<\/a> as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush\/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism. <\/p>\n

They invented new theories of secrecy<\/a> to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall\u2019s entire career is based on a well-documented claim<\/a> that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act \u2014 enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I \u2014 than <\/a>all prior presidents combined<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

That the War on Terror itself was racist and Islamophobic<\/a> \u2014 how else to explain year after year of predominantly Muslim countries being bombed<\/a> by the Bush and Obama administrations? \u2014 was barely disputed in liberal discourse. Karl Rove\u2019s core campaign strategy in 2002 and 2004 was to place anti-gay referenda on as many state ballots as possible<\/a>, and disseminate slanderous propaganda about same-sex couples, all to incentivize evangelicals to vote. And now we\u2019re subjected to the revolting sanctimony of the very same same operatives and supporters who did that, trying to prove the unprecedented evil of Trump by insisting that at least prior administrations did not rely on bigoted tropes or racist rhetoric. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents \u2014 a conclusion I would probably accept \u2014 how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals\u2019 most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans<\/a> that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda<\/a> and thus likely responsible for the 9\/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents \u2014 a conclusion I would probably accept \u2014 how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals\u2019 most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans<\/a> that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda<\/a> and thus likely responsible for the 9\/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS<\/a>?<\/p>\n

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the division on the center-left over the past four years has been shaped by whether one sees Trump as a symptom of American pathologies or as its primary cause, of whether one views the return of pre-Trump \u201cnormalcy\u201d as something to loathe or something to crave, of whether one views the Bush\/Cheney years and War on Terror abuses (to say nothing of the horrors of the Cold War) as at least as bad as anything Trump has ushered in or whether one sees those pre-Trump evils as somehow more benign and less ignoble.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush killed more people, Obama deported and assassinated more people, and both of them normalized the excesses of the US state security apparatus.<\/p>\n

Trump is a lesson that can be learned from, because the evil that put him in power did not come from him, though he certainly has no lack of personal evil, it came from a broken and corrupt society.<\/p>\n

No fundamental change means that in 4 or 8 years something worse, if just because it is more subtle and more competent, will be knocking at the orifices of the American body politic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world: That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy \u2014 a longing, a desire, a craving \u2014 has long been …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,394,464,389,399,504,373,377,454],"class_list":["post-175853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-good-writing","tag-history","tag-iraq","tag-philosophy","tag-terrorism","tag-war","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}