The Guantánamo Ruling Was A Setback, But The Bush Revolution Still Is Alive & Kicking

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. – GIL SCOTT-HERON

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between the core conservative tenet that the less government and the less obtrusive government the better and the actions of our president, who turned out to be such a faux conservative, are his unprecedented power grabs over the last seven years.

When taken as a whole these power grabs are nothing less than revolutionary in the most uncomplimentary sense of that word since the greatest fear of the Founding Fathers was that the young republic would backslide into an imperial presidency.

That has come to pass some 230 years later with the substantial help of a cowed Congress and a public living in fear, apathy or a combination of the two, and was on display last week when the Supreme Court ruled for no less than the third time — the first two rulings having been more or less ignored — that the Military Commissions Act legislating a rump legal system for detaining and prosecuting enemy combatants was out of legal bounds.

This, a 5-4 majority of justices reasoned, was because of the act’s suspension of habeas corpus and other kangaroo court trappings which denied terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay the key legal right embedded in the Constitution.

One could logically assume that the War on Terror is being fought to preserve the Great Writ and the other foundation stones of American democracy, but the Bush administration has used the GWOT in a bald-faced effort to undermine those foundation stones and shore up its imperial presidency. In the process it has tracked down and incarcerated, let alone tried and convicted, remarkably few of the truly dangerous jihadists while wrongfully imprisoning dozens or possibly hundreds of petty crooks, goatherds and other innocents — and then throwing away the key.

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