War Is Holy, This I Know – For Dear Leader Tells Me So

by William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Inside the FBI's Terrorism Factory

"I take President Obama's word for it that troops will not be engaged on the ground," eructated MSNBC's Ed Schultz, rebuking investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill for fomenting doubts about the wisdom of the Dear Leader's war in Libya. When Scahill made a passing reference to "your President Obama," Schultz morphed into a portlier, more articulate version of Sean Hannity: "`My' President Obama? Is he your president, too? Jeremy, is he your president, too?"
A suitable response to hectoring of this kind from a certified cultist would be the following:
"I am not a member of the U.S. military, which means that I do not have a commander-in-chief. I am not an employee of the executive branch of the federal government, which means that the occupant of the White House is not my supervisor. Mr. Obama does not preside over me in any sense that I recognize. To the extent we have any relationship at all, Mr. Obama should be considered my subordinate, one of the hired help. He certainly doesn't have any moral or legal standing to pretend that he can order me to do anything, and if I had the opportunity I would place him under citizen's arrest for his crimes against the Constitution, individual liberty, and the peace of nations – of which his criminal assault on Libya is the most recent but hardly the only example."
There was a time, perhaps five of six years ago, when Ed Schultz was a genuinely independent radio commentator of a left-leaning populist bent. I doubt that the Ed Schultz of 2005 would recognize the sycophantic invertebrate who began the segment with Scahill by uttering the following homily on the theme of the Leader Principle: "This isn't Bush-talk; this is totally different from Iraq.... The president has gone on record saying that Libyan agents have killed Americans – that's all as an American I need to hear; let's get it done."
The doctrine of citizenship-as-submission to the Dear Leader's divine will is indeed "Bush talk" of the most obnoxious variety. It was preached with remarkable clarity during a July 11, 2006 exchange between Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Steven Bradbury, at the time head of the Office of Legal Counsel for the "Justice" Department.
At issue was the Wee Emperor's deliberate misrepresentation of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, which did impose some trivial (and largely ignored) restrictions on the treatment of the detainees who are held illegally at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Bradbury insisted that because the Hamdan ruling "does implicitly recognize we're in a war," it effectively authorizes the president to do anything he wants to anyone of his choosing, since such decisions are supposedly permissible "under the law of war."
Leahy pointed out that the Hamdan decision – whatever its faults – explicitly rejected the Bush administration's claim of illimitable war powers, and upbraided the OLC for giving Bush the "cockamamie idea" that such a claim had been validated in that ruling.
"Was the president right or was he wrong?" Leahy demanded of Bradbury.
"The president is always right," oozed Bradbury in reply.
The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a substantive difference between Bradbury's statement and Ed Schultz's insistence that an unsupported presidential assertion is sufficient authority to justify an aggressive war.
A slightly less acute version of the same leader-cult mentality was exhibited by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine. Drum's endorsement of Obama's illegal war in Libya rests heavily on what I've come to call the Gnostic Fallacy – namely, that the president is invested with prophetic powers giving him wisdom and insight mere mortals don't possess:.................
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"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored; Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. "
~John Adams
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