MIKE LOFGREN | 21 Feb 2014
billmoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in
Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable
government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists
at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington
partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN
sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The
subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which
operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is
formally in power.
During
the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits
decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has
it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal.
That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics
of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits
of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On
one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public
can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the
1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
-snip-
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
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