Why the Dems Won뭪 Impeach Bush: Noam Chomsky Predicted 2008 Back in 1973

McCamy Taylor

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Mon Jan-28-08 03:09 PM
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Why the Dems Won뭪 Impeach Bush: Noam Chomsky Predicted 2008 Back in 1973

I am not making this up. I found this on the internet today. Here is a link. It is dated 1973.

Watergate: A Skeptical View by Noam Chomsky

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19730920.htm

In the wake of Watergate, when everyone was congratulating themselves on what a great job they were doing on cleaning up our democracy, Noam Chomsky spelled out the future of the United States. It was not a pretty picture, but it was accurate. Chomsky predicted the Bush-Cheney administration, its use of Article II to create an executive branch above the law and the Democratic Congress which seems incapable of impeachment.

About presidential powers:

Nixon's personal authority has suffered from Watergate, and power will return to men who better understand the nature of American politics. But it is likely that the major long-term consequence of the present confrontation between Congress and the President will be to establish executive power still more firmly. Nixon's legal strategy is probably a winning one, if not for him (for he has violated the rules), then for the position that the Presidency is beyond the reach of the law. Kleindienst, Ehrlichman, and Nixon's lawyers have laid the issue out squarely. In spite of their occasional disclaimers, the import of their position is that the President is subject to no legal constraints. The executive alone determines when and whom to prosecute, and is thus immune. When issues of national security are invoked, all bars are down.

About impeachment:

But reverence for the Presidency is far too potent an opiate for the masses to be diminished by a credible threat of impeachment. Such an effective device for stifling dissent, class consciousness, or even critical thought will not be lightly abandoned. Furthermore, Congress has neither the will nor the capacity to manage the domestic economy or the global system.

snip

If the choice is between impeachment and the principle that the President has absolute power (subject only to the need to invoke national security), then the latter principle will prevail. Thus the precedent will probably be established, more firmly and clearly than heretofore, that the President is above the law, a natural corollary to the doctrine8 that no law prevents a superpower from enforcing ideological conformity within its domains.

Where Nixon slipped up, according to Chomsky, is he attacked status quo figures뾪embers of the Democratic Party moderate wing of whom the corporations approved and business figures( like Katherine Graham of the WaPo) when he should have limited himself to going after the counter culture. It is perfectly acceptable in the US to use illegal means to strip fringe groups such as communists of their Constitutional rights, but not people like Muskie or Kennedys. The American political system works by offering voters two parties which represent the same economic interests. Neither side is allowed to use illegal means to attack the other side.

But the conditions that permitted the rise of McCarthy and Nixon endure. Fortunately for us and for the world, McCarthy was a mere thug and Nixon's mafia overstepped the bounds of acceptable trickery and deceit with such obtuseness and blundering vulgarity that they were called to account by powerful forces that had not been demolished or absorbed. But sooner or later, under the threat of political or economic crisis, some comparable figure may succeed in creating a mass political base, bringing together socioeconomic forces with the power and the finesse to carry out plans such as those that were conceived in the Oval Office. Only perhaps he will choose his domestic enemies more judiciously and prepare the ground more thoroughly.

Chomsky closes by discussing how the illegal incursions into Cambodia and Laos뾞nalogous to Bush and Cheney lying to trick us into war with Iraq---were grounds for impeachment. However, Congress, the press and the American people showed no will to impeach over this issue.

Regarding Kissinger:

Liberal political commentators sigh with relief that Kissinger has barely been tainted -- a bit of questionable wire-tapping, but no close involvement in the Watergate shenanigans. Yet by any objective standards, the man is one of the great mass murderers of the modern period. He presided over the expansion of the war to Cambodia, with consequences that are now well known, and the vicious escalation of the bombing of rural Laos, not to speak of the atrocities committed in Vietnam, as he sought to achieve a victory of some sort for imperial power in Indochina. But he wasn't implicated in the burglary at the Watergate or in the undermining of Muskie, so his hands are clean.

This is a fascinating document. What it says, in essence, is that the Democratic Congress is not broken. America is broken and needs to get its priorities straight.

The way to do that? New voters with new priorities and beliefs need to make their voices heard in the voting booth. The people who were children during the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties can change this equation. Immigrants will have a different outlook. People who were disenfranchised in 1973 but are now able to vote. And people who once drank the "we must be a strong America" kool aid but who have opened their eyes---all of them can make Noam Chomsky's prophecy for America no longer a reality.

I think maybe this is what change needs to be about.