CULTURE WAR III: POSSE COMITATUS INNA HOUSE

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Friday, October 17, 2008

posted by Cintra Wilson at 12:21 PM
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"You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style."

--George W. Bush, after winning the 2004 Presidential election.

Mission accomplished! America is, indeed, spent.

The American economy has finally succumbed to its binge of economic drunkorexia: The body was starved, so that the head could get loaded. The head got so high it was cross-eyed, and inevitably plowed the markets into a tree.

Stefan Reyniak, a partner at Raycliff Capital Private Equity in New York, told me, "The American economy is having a near-death experience: It is floating over the table looking down at its own body."

History is full of clever opportunists. One of Rome's more entrepreneurial sorts was a guy called Crassus, who assembled his own fire department from a team of slaves. If your house caught fire, he'd offer to buy it from you for a fraction of its value. If you agreed to sell it to him, he'd put the fire out. If you didn't sell, he'd watch it burn down and tell you what an idiot you were for not selling it to him.

Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury (and Goldman Sachs alumni) appears to have learned from the best.

Some people, apparently haven't been learning much at all, lately.
Look out, John McCain: Your Veep is showing! On CBS, no less:

Katie Couric: Explain to me why [Alaska's proximity to Russia] enhances your foreign policy credentials.

Sarah Palin: Well ... it certainly does. Because ... our ... our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there is Russia...

Katie Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Sarah Palin: (nodding) We have trade missions back and forth .. .we... we do. It's very important when ... when you consider even national security issues with Russia as...Putin: Where's his head? And ... and ... ahh ... comes into... ah ... the airspace of the United States of America. Wh ... where do they go? It... it's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is... from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation --Russia -- because they are right there. That are right next to our state.

The Couric/Palin interview left many questioned unanswered.

For example: Which designer's swimwear will Governor Palin be wearing in the bikini portion of the election?
And will she be field-dressing a Cossack for the talent portion?
And will she be volunteering the use of her own bilge-pump to help in the Wall Street bailout?

Governor Palin also didn't comment on the recent Army Times announcement that beginning October 1, the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division, "will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North....the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald assures us that when the Posse Comitatus Act (the act preventing the government from using the Army against fellow Americans) expires on October 1, the Bush Administration most likely won't use this brigade to shut down the elections and declare martial law. This is heartening news for those of us who have been a little bit nervous about Dick Cheney's failure, so far, to shoot any American college students while in office.

"The point," sayeth Greenwald, "is that the deployment is a very dangerous precedent, quite possibly illegal, and a radical abandonment of an important democratic safeguard. As always with first steps of this sort, the danger lies in how the power can be abused in the future."

The fine print on the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 really brings the abusable bits to life. It basically says that the Chief Executive reserves the right to declare martial law whenever he feels like it -- for any threats, provocations, "incidents" however real or imaginary. This Act was mitigated somewhat in 2008, but the President, as usual, doodled 'signing statements' all over it - which, we must assume, looked like the usual obscene boy's room graffiti drawings.

"Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah 'Evita' Palin," wrote Naomi Wolf. "You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state."

On the upside, financial market regulations are now clamping down with a vengeance again, just like they did after the Great Depression. Perhaps we should think of them as economic rehab.

If Amy Winehouse can get well, then so can America.

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