The Emperor has no clothes. But don't wait for the indolent Washington press corps to report on it.
Bush's Clever Cognitive DissonanceBy Robert Parry
November 16, 2007
In a Nov. 15 speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, the President embraced the Constitution’s checks and balances as a vital protection against tyranny. And he demanded that federal judges act as fair referees, not political or ideological partisans.
To many Americans who have been aghast at Bush’s six-plus years of trampling the Constitution, such pronouncements might represent a textbook case of “cognitive dissonance,” a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension when one’s stated principles are at odds with one’s actions. .....
In this case, the Washington press corps reported on Bush’s speech as if the President were entirely sincere and left out contradictory facts.
For instance, there was silence about how Bush prevailed in Election 2000 by getting five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a recount of votes in Florida that – if it had been allowed to tally all legally cast ballots – might well have put Al Gore in the White House.
Instead, the five Republican justices cast aside any sense of neutrality – and their own principles about avoiding federal interference in state decisions – to hammer together a twisted ruling that halted the recount and gave the election to George W. Bush. ..... Yet, in his Nov. 15 speech, Bush declared how important it was for judges to act as honest umpires.
“When people see the umpire rooting for one team, public confidence in our courts is eroded, the sense of unfairness is heightened and our political debates are poisoned,” Bush said. “So we will insist … on judges who call the game fairly.”
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Still, Bush’s Nov. 15 speech talked glowingly of the constitutional “checks and balances” as a guard against tyranny.
“When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny,” Bush said. “They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government's powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. …
“Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities – and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.”
But for the past six years, Bush has asserted his right as “unitary executive” to ignore any law that he chooses by asserting his "plenary" powers and attaching “signing statements.”
In effect, if one examines Bush’s claims of unlimited executive power – and overlays that with a “war on terror” of indefinite duration – a fair conclusion is that the President has, in effect, eliminated both the "checks and balances " and the “unalienable rights” that the Founders enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Under Bush’s theories, constitutional rights can be selectively denied by one person, him.
Yet, in his Federalist Society speech, Bush was the rock-ribbed protector of the Founders’ dream of a constitutional Republic. He chided his political opponents for their more flexible interpretation of the Constitution.
“Advocates of a more active role for judges sometimes talk of a ‘living Constitution,’” Bush said. “In practice, a living Constitution means whatever these activists want it to mean. They forgot that our Constitution lives because we respect it enough to adhere to its words.”
But what Bush has sought in key federal judicial appointments, including his Supreme Court selections of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, are judges who will predictably assent to Bush’s extraordinary assertion of presidential powers, regardless of the words in the Constitution or the intent of the Founders.
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I first encountered this tactic in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan sought to frustrate the intent of government policies from the 1970s by appointing individuals who were hostile to those goals but who claimed to embrace the same principles. ..... What the Right – and especially the neocons – drew from these experiences was that the Washington press corps could be tough when contesting some narrow falsehood or a slight hypocrisy, but would ignore audacious misrepresentations, at least when they came from Republicans backed by aggressive right-wing media attack groups. ..... Indeed, one of the most successful features of Bush’s presidency may be his ability to exploit cognitive dissonance to avoid accountability for his actions. While Bush doesn’t blush when his actions belie his words, the American political system can’t seem to cope, incapable of either reconciling Bush’s dishonesty or enforcing any accountability upon him.
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