Bush's Third Term? You're Living It

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine,
for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as
president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now
living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of
Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly
be talking endlessly
about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into
account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws
at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary
rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim
interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture
him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose,
yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We
might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the
standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget
was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that
yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of
course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his
second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars
rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through
on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he
chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also be escalating
the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft
to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands
with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding
the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the
whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate
executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I torture this one
some more, please?") Rizzo still serving,
at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House
and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people
like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in
his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of
people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly
have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have guaranteed
that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or
promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush's
third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed
reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the
third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with
insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such
proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.

During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from
Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials
responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched.
If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the
early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone with
another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA
interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would
undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that
we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby
have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for
crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term
secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits,
but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than
what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would
surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast
bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden
from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is
also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following
Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law
and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were
otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in
all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything
described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them
away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the
executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven
months.

Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For
one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded
presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes,
lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the
obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new
Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded
and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in
fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than
bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more
active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still
wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out
before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make
all that much difference.

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