Must read from Frank Rich today: The Coup at Home

[flpoljunkie]

The Coup at Home
November 11, 2007

By FRANK RICH

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

more...worth reading in its entirety

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11rich.html?hp

[Botany]

1. The Coup was in Florida 2000

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate
the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America
has now been internalized as the new normal.

snip

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary
sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that
Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who
might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say
things they know are false just to move on.

[maddiejoan]

2. Florida 2000

was the putsch.

12/12/2000 was the coup.

[flpoljunkie]

3. Thanks for posting these salient paragraphs.