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Bush’s Democracy Doctrine
President Bush has recently demonstrated his admiration of another famous George, and no, I’m not talking about his dad. Bush has become a bit too enamored with Orwell’s notorious dictum “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength,” an indictment of excessive government power in 1984. According to our esteemed President, only by continuing an unending war against an amorphous enemy can we achieve peace. Only by authorizing the government to examine your library records, phone records, and bank records without a warrant or judicial oversight can we be free. And only by not knowing about these dubious, if not illegal, government intrusions do we as a society have strength.
Bush was at his Orwellian finest last week after the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times reported that the government was searching through millions of financial records in hopes of nabbing a terrorist. Bush, of course, called the report “disgraceful.” He added, “We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.” It seems that few would object to such a program assuming that it had the proper oversight in place to guard against the government becoming over-zealous with the innocent. Yet the Bush Administration, from energy meetings to warrantless wiretapping on citizens, does everything in its power to operate in absolute secrecy.
Journalists who exposed questionable government activities, like the Time’s report on NSA spying on American citizens, were rewarded with Pulitzer Prizes. Republicans in Congress reacted a bit differently. A House resolution that passed 227-183, almost strictly along party lines, condemned the news media for its actions and said it expects the media’s cooperation in the future. In similar news, the Chinese government announced Monday that it was creating a law that would fine the news media, including foreign organizations, for reporting on sudden incidents without permission. It’s ironic that the GOP prides itself on national security and freedom, yet more closely mirrors the Chinese Communist Party than any Western democracy. Bush and his team have never had a penchant for the checks and balances of democracy.
Recently, the Supreme Court kicked in one of those checks when it ruled against the kangaroo courts trying “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay. Apparently, trials that don’t allow the defendant to be present the whole time or allow him/her to see all the evidence against him/her somehow run contrary to the Bill of Rights. This ruling came two years after the Court proclaimed that holding detainees indefinitely without charging them was also unconstitutional. As may be expected, the Bush Administration dragged its feet in complying with that monumental ruling, as many defendants have yet to see the inside of any kind of court room. They appear to be doing the same thing with the new decision.
Bush’s justification for holding detainees indefinitely is the same faulty logic he used for Iraq: we must do this if we don’t want to be attacked again. However, the Iraq charade is finally being exposed for what it is. With every other excuse for the invasion used up, Bush has resorted to repeatedly preaching the virtues of democracy building. Yet what does Bush exactly mean by democracy? Is it a system where the government can operate in secrecy, threaten to prosecute the news media, and ignore all other legal and independent institutions that were created to check the power of the executive? Censorship is not a virtue by which we should build a democracy. George Bush seems to embody George Orwell’s Big Brother, so much so that Bush may in fact append Orwell’s dictum: dictatorship is democracy.
Thomas Coen is the co-founder of and an editor for Incite Magazine. He is a senior government and economics major at Wesleyan University. Besides Incite, he heads the Wesleyan chapter of the Roosevelt Institution, the nation’s first student think-tank. Thomas is a student representative for Campus Progress and co-hosts a weekly political talk show, Don’t Believe the Hype, on WESU. He has interned both in government for Senator Jeffords, and in the non-profit sector for People for the American Way. In addition, Thomas has worked on political campaigns at both the state and national level. Thomas can be contacted at Thomas@InciteMagazine.org
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