The Gates of the Keeper

March 14, 2006

However language actually evolves, the suffix "-gate" is a well-established part of the vernacular of American presidential scandals.  In this administration, these gates just keep on opening onto a larger  appreciation of the broader garden.  In no particular order, I am referring to:  Ports-gate, Spy-gate, Torture-gate, Katrina-gate, Miers-gate, Leak-gate, Iraq-gate, and the -gate that headlined the entire subsequent litany:  Election-gate.

The Judiciary, at first deferential to presidential authority in the wake of 9/11 and having installed President-Adjudicated George W. Bush to the Oval Office in the first place, began to awaken to its constitutional responsibility two years ago over indefinite detentions of "enemy combatants," first those of American-born citizens, then those of the UK and Australia, then even to other foreign nationals, apparently those deemed ultimately to have been non-combatants, after all.  Today, the Judiciary threw down the towel on the Moussaoui death-penalty trial over prosecutorial misconduct, a tendency that has led to juridical reversals and dismissals in a series of "terrorism" trials to date over the past two years and is a clear message from this branch of government that the Executive's period of suspension from responsibility following the 911 attacks has expired.

Judge Leonie Brinkema stopped the proceedings and had a little meltdown over the Prosecution's conscientious violation of her orders not to disclose privileged information and coach witnesses.  The admonition not to engage in this practice, given well in advance of the misconduct, was unnecessary.  Coaching of witnesses through the revelation of protected documentation is simply outside the playbook of juridical due process, not to mention legal ethics, and every bush-league lawyer knows this.  Violation of a judge's order is technically a crime, and this crime's perpetrator ought to have to explain her motives.  But even if it wasn't a crime, technically, the over-zealous lawyer that brought the admittedly farcical proceedings to such a comical end state squandered appreciable sums of public money involved in the trial itself and should be held financially liable, at a minimum, for her unethical shenanigans.

Why in the world would a nation so great as the United States wish to execute such a relative nincompoop as Zacarias Moussaoui?  It is painfully obvious that the man is an idiot that no organization would be able to depend upon for a sophisticated operation.  To the American public it is clear that Moussaoui is nothing more than a Jihadi wannabe, a disaffected European-born Moroccan with an axe to grind but too much baggage for any self-respecting terrorists to trust with anything significant.  Why do we want to kill this man?  And why are we spending so much money to accomplish this?  And why are presumably respectable civil servants in the employment of the federal government violating court order to try to lobby for this man's execution?  This is insane and not right.

Thank you, Esquire Carla Martin, of the Transportation Security Administration, for committing your ridiculous crime and lunging your career, and thank you, Judge Brinkema for the extraordinary courage to put your foot down on the firmament of the oath you swore, given your finding is against the greatest power ever assembled on the planet.

A society will tolerate drifts from the center if circumstances demand.  But the drastic drift that the Bush administration has sent the American nation into since its illegal invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, increasingly appears not be even be demanded by realities on the ground at the time.  However, no self-respecting scholar on the planet will deny that the Iraq War has legitimized what was on 9/11/2001 a ragtag group of nearly universally marginalized fanatics.  Nobody will deny but that the Iraq War has made Americans overseas much less safe and the entire nation vulnerable to attacks both physical and rhetorical.  Team Bush has elevated the cave-dwellers to populist parity on the world stage with the United States.  Even the Defense Secretary of the United States admits that the most powerful force for propaganda ever to exist on the planet is losing the media war to a bunch of fundamentalist fanatics.  It's all wrong, all of it, head to toe, in need for a vast re-think.  And there is no one and no entity empowered to do that beyond Team Bush, which got us here in the first place.  So, it's a standoff and a whittle job with lots of wet work.  Thank you, Judge Brinkema, for sharpening your pocket-knife this morning.

As the Executive Branch descends into damage control without end, the legislative branch is hobbled by its constraint to electoral cycles.  The Judiciary, however, is neither beholden to time, nor for important federal seats to electoral cycles, nor, theoretically, to political quid pro quo.  Tellingly, it is the Judiciary that has been foreshadowing for the nation for the past two years the eventual eclipse of unconstrained and idiotic executive excess.  Had the President been a Roosevelt or Lincoln it might all have turned out impossibly different, for a Roosevelt or Lincoln would have long ago resolved Guantanamo and would have made less of a mess of Iraq and would have pitched domestic spying and port sales to Arabs more skillfully and to greater reward.  But the sitting President is not such a figure, and history is almost certain to excoriate his legacy.  The President's vision, it turns out, exceeds his grasp, and we must not allow a President's tragic flaw to set a standard as a metaphor for American incompetence.

Unless a hopelessly doomed Republican Party can do the impossible and allow the Articles of Impeachment to be argued on the congressional high stage, then the Legislative Branch will follow the Judiciary in the agenda of reform as Republican congressional members are taken to the woodshed in November by their respective constituencies.  Finally, the Executive Branch will have to pay the price of reform, if not in the unlikely form of impeachment, then certainly through banishment of the Republican Party from the highest office of the land in the 2008 cycle.

But don't count your chickens too quickly.  As ballyhooed as she is in the press, Hillary Clinton is simply unelectable, and there is no Democratic Old Man to stand against the Maverick Arizonan, all cuddly again with the Republican moneymen and power-brokers.

There is one thing that America can celebrate in all of this.  As a nation we are at the nadir of our present predicament if we are prepared to face our circumstances with responsibility and some degree of creative genius.  We're in the process of that, and it is chugging along in the Judiciary.

Keep 'em coming.  I'm looking forward to hearing decisions on Guantanamo and South Dakota sometime soon.

Sometimes I wonder if the next flaming executive streaker on the national scene doesn't wind up being Booze-gate.  I can't imagine not looking on the liquor cabinet a bit longingly in this long dark night of the exfoliated soul.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.