Bush Declares Self ‘Mega Decider’
New documents ensure Dubya Will Rule America, Should Calamity Strike. Free Balloons!
It’s just one of those obscure little unreported-upon conspiracy theory-ready hunks of floating White House detritus, a couple of odd, sticky, foul-smelling documents no one really wants to touch and no one knows quite what to make of, probably means nothing, probably being misread anyway, all a bit overblown and strange and not all that important and not all that different than the way things are now.
Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless the violent twinge of queasy paranoia crossed with that uncontrolled bout of colon-clenching sighing you experience is deadly accurate and your radar for all things sinister and Rovean is right on target as you read about the delightfully titled National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, wherein it is calmly and furtively revealed that, in essence, George W. Bush owns your sorry ass.
Or, to put it another way, it looks like the Bumbling One just gave himself ever more power. Power to control and dictate the entire government, power to really spread the gospel of happy GOP incompetence, power to command the entire wobbly American universe should some sort of epic — or not so epic, as the case may be — calamity strike the homeland.
It goes something like this: Should any “decapitating event” occur in America that somehow incapacitates the D.C. power structure, should “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” take place, well then, all power and decision making would devolve to the White House, which would then attempt to orchestrate our very survival and oversee all essential governmental functions with none other than the president himself as, well, Super-Mega Lord Decider. With extra crayons.
You know, a dictator.
Wait wait wait, I hear you moan through your first pour of wine for the day, a futile attempt to stave off the sucker punch of doom you received from that last paragraph. There is nothing really new here. Hell, we’ve had a silly, ominous, “Terminator”-tinged master plan for post-apocalyptic America in place since Reagan was knee-high to a simpleminded jellybean, plans for a scowling “shadow government” to run the joint should, say, Russian nukes blow up all our Safeways or China secretly buy up all our Skippy peanut butter.
And more recently, this plan was transferred into the hairy, pockmarked arms of our own Homeland Security Department, which seems entirely appropriate, given how you like to imagine such a plan living alone in a dark and musty Pentagon subbasement stocked to the rafters with rusty Winchesters and shiny bayonets and giant shoe box-sized satellite phones from 1987 and a small mountain of vacuum-sealed emergency meat rations that will last through 2197, or at least the next season of “24.” Cool.
But now, Shrub has seen fit to dust the thing off and make a few, uh, “revisions,” most notably the one that appears to shift the decision-making process away from Homeland Security (which was then to disperse responsibility to various agencies and emergency services), straight to the Oval Office itself because, hey, who better to decide who gets to do what to whom when the s– hits the fan than the most secretive, warmongering, never-saw-an-illegal-power-grab-it-didn’t-like administration in American history? Gives you that warm, fuzzy, well-protected feeling all over, doesn’t it? Like a rash? In your spleen?
Even more heartwarming, “catastrophe,” in the vague, nearly useless language of these documents, could mean, why, just about anything at all. Hurricane? Flood? Low polling numbers for Giuliani? A bad tattoo of Alberto Gonzales’ smirky face on Jenna Bush’s sacrum? You bet! Because who gets to decide what constitutes a “catastrophe”? Why, Shrub himself, that’s who. What’s more, the event doesn’t even have to occur in America (see “regardless of location”). Such a perceived “disruption” can happen anywhere in the world and with a press of the shiny red button next to his bed, Bush kicks the Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) into gear. Neat!
I know what you’re thinking. And I completely agree: Such secret plans are one of the most adorable, comic-booky aspects of dumb, ultrasecretive administrations. After all, do many ‘Merkins not love to swoon and polish their NRA memberships as they imagine all those White House suits suddenly turning into patriotic superheroes at the first sign of a meteor strike or an attack by an alien super race or maybe just if Iraq gets a bit too uppity and starts bootlegging illegal DVDs of “The Office”? You bet they do.
And then boom, the nation goes into lockdown and it’s a strict military state and Lynn Cheney starts enjoying sweaty night visions of Dick lumbering purposefully through the White House halls deciding who to nuke next as Dubya quivers in the corner and the flying monkeys prepare the escape pod. Just like in that Will Smith movie! Neat!
Let us now be serious for a moment. Let us hold back the sarcasm and step back and breathe a sigh of relief because I’m sure Dubya’s changes to NSPD 51 mean a whole lotta nothing. I’m sure it’s just another standard — albeit a bit weird — governmental procedural, boring and forgettable and just one of thousands of such indecipherable, hazily unconstitutional legal quirkballs in the Pentagon’s creaky file cabinets, and Dubya’s recent changes are just an honest tweak to what really amounts to a rather ridiculous, fantastical document in the first place. Yes, surely it’s just a bunch of silly leftist paranoia to think that something dark and nasty could result from such a move.
After all, Shrub only has a year and a half left in office. Plus, his power has been severely truncated by the Dems. Why would he care to try for such a thuggish, cagey power grab now? What would be the point? Except, you know, to savagely tilt the next election and to further the new ‘n’ brutal neocon agenda of perpetual war and as a desperate, last-gasp move to prove he actually has the cojones to do something so appalling, so perfectly megalomaniacal, it’s sure to rescue his rotten legacy from history’s compost pile? I mean, besides that.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him. Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the
© The San Francisco Chronicle
“After all, Shrub only has a year and a half left in office.”
Unless, you know, he decides we need him to stay on because of some emergency. Can you say “President for Life”? I thought you could…
Mr. Morford: A couple of questions about National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20
- Are they one in the same thing or two separate things?
- When were they first written? As part of the ‘Patriot Act’?
- Have they ever been invoked?
- Doesn’t any part of the Patriot Act give this same kind of power. Pretty much everything was given away in that legislation.
- Any time-line on the directive - i.e. does it have to be reviewed yearly?
- Did the congress OK these ‘minor revisions’ or did the executive branch have the power to revise without consent?
I agree with Clark Kent. With all of the changes that have been pushed through our Kangaroo Congress, the signing statements, etc, what is to stop the Super-mega Decider from simply making a statement that voids all further elections and announces that he is the Leader of Perpetual Mission Accomplished (PMA).
I seriously doubt Bush has plans to be, or wants to be the permanent president, but he certainly seems to be paving for a perpetual conservative presidency.
Well, if you’re going for conspiracy theories…wouldn’t this latest little nudge in the direction of fascist dictatorship tie in nicely with Halliburton’s contract to build huge detention centers…? And how about the Military Commissions Act that robs us of Habeas Corpus? It’s a web being spun by a set of very clever spiders and we are the unwitting oblivious flies, buzzing around thinking we’re still living in a democracy, playing our video games, driving frantically back and forth on freeways to malls, snorting cocaine up our respective noses, drinking ourselves into stupors, charging mountains of useless junk on our credit cards, putting little yellow stick on ribbons on our SUVs and imagining that that somehow shows support for our sons who are dying, while we betray their trust by sending them to wars to protect our “national interests” (read=oil)…
What happens to flies caught in the spider web? We have only ourselves to blame.
wilmoor,
you bet there will be a perpetual conservative presidency.
After all, when was the last time a genuine liberal was in the white house? Franklin Roosevelt barely qualifies. Kennedy? Nope–too many people kid themselves that he was a liberal. Johnson? Close in some ways, lightyears away in others. Carter? Same deal. Clinton? His acts were mostly conservative.
As for the current crop of contenders: Obama is a conservative at heart who will do nothing–nothing at all–to further the progressive agenda if elected. Clinton? She’s the same. Edwards? Closer … closer … but close enough? I doubt it. All in all, none of the current contenders will have the real deep-seated desire to do more than make a few cosmetic improvements to the damage that decades of Republicans and Republican-lites have done.
Realists know that real liberals like Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader don’t have a prayer of riding to the oval office.
Why is this?
As Gore Vidal put it so well, in America, the people are divided into two groups: the reactionaries, called Republicans, and the conservatives, called Democrats. Liberals–real left wingers who believe in turning our dog-eat-dog society into something civilized–are not represented except by the fringe.
So it almost doesn’t matter if Bush declares himself Grand Fucking Poobah For Life–whoever follows him in ‘09 will be walking in the giant crater-sized footsteps this dinosaur has left behind.
Iowairish asked:
- Are they one in the same thing or two separate things?
- When were they first written? As part of the ‘Patriot Act’?
- Have they ever been invoked?
- Doesn’t any part of the Patriot Act give this same kind of power. Pretty much everything was given away in that legislation.
- Any time-line on the directive - i.e. does it have to be reviewed yearly?
- Did the congress OK these ‘minor revisions’ or did the executive branch have the power to revise without consent?
>>>
The answers exist elsewhere, but, briefly:
They are duplicate directives, one from National Security and one from Homeland Security, both dated May 9th 2007
Congress has no authority to deflect or rescind Presidential Directives. They do have the choice of enacting a law making this unilateral power grab illegal, and asking Herr Bush to sign the law; or they can impeach Herr Bush for the illegal power grab.
No time limit. They are Presidential Directives. And, they are not revisions to the Homeland Security Act, That is a LAW. These are edicts from on high - kind of like the ten commandments.
BTW, while you are thumbing thru Common Dreams, you might want to check out the article about ‘moronic thought’, if it can be called that.
Your questions are perfect examples of how to deflect rational and logical thought, through the use of moronic questions signifying a total lack of knowledge about the subject under discussion.
No “mainstream media” have touched this “Dictator-for-life” directive—which was furtively signed under the radar on May 9!!! Congress is not even in the loop!
And by the way, this disastratous so-called president gets to make decisions in the BUSINESS sector—as in shutting down web sites like this one (which is not to his liking) or any other business that is not marching in lockstep with the neocon agenda. If you think we have a semblance of a free market now, wait till our MBA decider gets to play CEO-in-chief. He’s probably bored with playing commander-in-thief by now—the only thing left is a little signature from Iraq’s “government” for the oil to $tart
flowing into the American oiligarchy’s swiss bank accounts!
This document is a dangerous threat to American citizens: it spells the end
of a democracy—an unbearable thought. Of course, our election process has been eroding for a couple of decades, reducing it to “democracy-lite.” I guess totalitarianism is one rite of passage this country has yet to experience.
There is a sinister design to the timing. How else can a MEGA-CORRUPT administration bury the mountain of criminal and treasonous evidence against it? How else can it “disappear” all those who question? Bush/Cheney/Rove are in a corner and remember what rabid animals can do when cornered.
HOUSTON…I THINK WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE…..
This is for real folks! I’m not too sure about the site or the author, but it is informative about this directive. Check out this link for more info:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55825
This isn’t about parties or politics. This is about a grab for RAW POWER. And Darth Cheney is the one spinning the web. This is scary enough that if Cheney isn’t impeached, I’m gonna sell the farm and head for another country. I really don’t want to go, so please help me out here.
Call your members of Congress now toll free at 800-828-0498, 800-459-1887 or 800-614-2803 to tell them it’s time to IMPEACH CHENEY. Demand they support/co-sponsor HR 333, the Articles of Impeachment of Cheney introduced by Kucinich in April. This is not a partisan issue. This is a moral and Constitutional issue about accountability and lawlessness. Call both the Dem’s and Repub’s in your state. Repeatedly!!
Then, vote in the National Cheney Impeachment Poll http://www.usalone.com/blogvoices.php?Cheney%20Impeachment%3F
Then vote in the poll to impeach Bush at MoveOn.Org
http://impeachbush.tv/index.html
Then, e-mail Pelosi ( AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov ) to put impeachment BACK ON THE TABLE!!! Better yet, call her office at one of the above toll free numbers.
Thanks
I’m having problems posting my comment. Is anybody else having a problem?
They’re on to you, Rebel. Start heading for that other country!
Wasn’t it Cosmos who wrote about this for us readers, not to long ago.
This is another so called legal way for Bush to control us all. Nothing in the news is right and not a peep out of Congress either, perhaps they like the idea of the president having complete control.
We had the Supreme Court decide an election, we had Diebold machines steal another. But hey, God voted for George, so why shouldn’t he be the supreme decider? He watered down FCC regulations allowing media monopolization. He suspended habeus corpus. He tortures. He attacks unprovoked. He destroys dissenters. He wiretaps and spies on his subjects, uh, citizens. He misplaces pallets of $100 bills as well as transitive verbs. He overthrows our enemies to make way for our bigger enemies. He is truely a pioneer. We are blessed to be led by an illiterate monkey, I mean a Christ-like Yale MBA, with God on his side. I welcome a catastrophe from which more W ideas can blossom. Only he in his infinte wisdom can see that if we systematically erode our own freedoms, then and only then will the Muslim extremists not hate us so, and subsequently will stop terrorizing us with their piles and piles of sand and rocks. And we all saw what a heckuva job he did with our last catastrophe in Nawlins. The lighting was exceptional! I suggest that every year from now on, on George’s birthday, we find a few dozen down and out Muslim Jihadists, or poor Merikans, and through either bribery or extortion convince them to fly some planes into something, just so we can bear witness to the awesome profiteering, I mean crisis management so often displayed by this great man amongst regular reality based working stiffs. Remember how he managed to fight off that pretzel that probably would have killed a regular non cheerleader from Yale? Or his idea to remove the trees from Arizona to combat the forest fires? The man is clearly at his best when involved in a catastrophe. The Terry Schiavo case was a fine example. He actually flew all the way from Crawford to DC to handle that nightmare of national proportions. Who else could have reacted so quickly to be sure of a painless death? So to all you conspiracy theorists who whine that extending this man unlimited power to manipulate the world and remove any and all feedback may not be in the country’s best interest, I say, have some faith. Surely Armegeddon is only a short time away. See yall in heaven, eye of a needle and camels be damned.
President CocoBananas’ power has been severely truncated by… who was that again? The Democrats? The ones who just gave him another blank check, one that includes the bonus prize of Operation Iranian Freedom, which, once the nukes or near-nukes start dropping, would constitute an “economic” emergency (severe cut in oil supply) “regardless of location?”
Oh, right. Just unwarranted paranoia. Got it.
Bu$h and Cheney will drop the nuclear bomb on Iran which will create the conditions for a permanent emergency, war without end, or at least until we have one party rule, and fill those detention camps with traitors like you all.
And most of the booboisie will buy it, they always have.
There’s further discussion on this at TalkingPointsMemo.com.
Yes, Cosoms did bring it up here a few times. I (and many others) referred it to TalkingPoints’ Muckrakers to investigate. They did….
WARNING: once you start looking at TalkingPoints you’ll be hooked for life!
Sorry…here’s the link
www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003310.php
Hey, xntrk,you might want to lighten up a bit on iowairish, who was simply seeking further information from Morford, not questioning his assumptions. Especially since the corporate media has not covered this issue at all, we have to get this information out there and not bang on folks for not being as up to speed as we’d like them to be. Iowairish is up to speed now, thanks to having read the article and hopefully having read your answers without taking umbrage at your closing remarks.
Moving on. Get ready to have the 2008 election cancelled. This is not a drill.
Marctileston: Great prose and sarcasm, my friend! I guess when the pain gets bad enough, humor is good medicine. Some studies show that a few survived the Concentration Camps by virtue of that very asset. I’m still hoping that our prayers are answered by some form of Divine intervention, nor do I rule out the power of Nature as Earth Mother (Venus) to offset the ungodly “rule” of Mars and these pygmies who place human and environmental life in such low esteem, that “gifted” with the Midas touch, they worship their piles of gold as everything around them dies, falls, falters or gasps for air.
On the note of humor: Maybe some TV network (Cable?) can do a “Vote for the Decider” show where everyday people can vote in who they believe would make a better DECIDER in times of crisis then our dear leader. It could make for good fun, and also merit a net run around polls.
and if that (conspiracy) scenario isn’t scary enuff, imagine a disaster/event wherein Dumbya the Temporary bites the big one and Cheney automatically then becomes the dicktator fer life! agghhhhhhhhhhh
only upside of this scenario is that his mechanical “heart” can’t possibly last too long. can it? agghhhhhhhhhhh
Alice in Wonderland: Thanks for understanding that asking questions in the genuine search for additional information / clarification / precision is critical for informed and productive debate. Maybe if everyone would just simply answer a question as a question, without projecting judgments on the questioner, the debate might indeed be more productive.
xntrk: Your judgement of me as ill informed and moronic is (a) quite off the mark and (b) using the same tactics as, say Rush Limbaugh, only from the ‘other’ side. Not helpful in the least. Swallow the judgment and the accusations next time. Think about how it might be for you to be on the receiving end of it.
iowairish, I appreciate your response to xntrk. I also gained information from that post, although you were the one taking the abuse. But supercilious people who disparage others actually are revealing their own inferior feelings about themselves, so let’s send charitable thoughts to xntrk, along with appreciation for rehabilitating our ignorance.
Kathyodat,
Hold the charitable thoughts, please! Don’t think I’ve ever been called supercilious before - most people stop at “Super!”. As for ‘rehabilitating our ignorance’, you could have run a google search on NSPD-51 and gotten reams more info about the document.
The reason I prefer to do my own research isn’t because I’m such a snob - It’s because I prefer to make up my own mind about what may or may not be a problem.
That’s what I did when Cosmo first posted the info on this board - I ran a google. It sure is more efficient then working my way thru the card file at the public library which is how I was first taught to do this stuff.
And always check the bio of the author. His/Her bias will often taint the information.
Who knows? they may be ’supercilious’ or worse!
It would appear that there are provisions for Bush to decide successor. in ‘general provision’ (20) it talks about effective implementation of succession of the presidency. anyone else have thoughts on this section?
-Also, i guess i missed this in h.s. govt class- but how is a presidential directive put into place? do they get to just write and say it’s so?? what’s the oversight?