Looking at Bush

After 9/11, I think we've got it wrong: thinking about this President as loyal to his base is probably the worst way to analyze his policies. We should have known that since then this is an administration more paranoid about its own power and its own coherence than any party loyalties that might have made them ascend to their commanding position. Certainly the news analysis of the President should have shifted to this standpoint after the last Congress began to diverge with Bush on immigration last year and the year before. But the good faith of the press towards this administration apparently is inexhaustible. Either that or they cannot cognize the simple fact that the President's decisions could be made without regard to anything other than the saftey of his own political position. And instead of analyzing this coherency--as the Washington Post has begun to do with its series on Cheney--we keep looking for hidden or latent origins informing choices that are made simply with regard to their ability to will power.
This good faith is evident today in the New York Times opinion page:

Judging from his decision yesterday to commute the 30-month sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. — who was charged with perjury and convicted — untarnished ideals are less of a priority than protecting the secrets of his inner circle and mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base.

Witness how unanalyzed the phrase "protecting the secrets of his inner circle" remains throughout the article, while the phrase "mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base" is continually used to make sense of the Libby commution. The Washington Post's headline "Bush Makes Libby Decision Largely Alone" is more accurate, and the news section of the Times has a better grip on reality. But notice how Bush's "doing what he wants" in the Times article is made to seem whimsical and tyrranous as opposed to motivated:

President Bush’s decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man — a leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants.

This isn't the act of a "liberated man:" this is a style of government that has developed and fostered in this administration consistently throughout the past years. Bush has been "liberated" ever since 9/11, and not because he was thereby able to use power more freely by channeling it slyly through the patriotism the event generated, but because he has crafted a way to govern that is concerned constantly with its own liberation--that is, its own ability to consistently wield enormous amounts of power. "Liberation" is the act whereby those who would curb Presidential power are stifled and defended against, but not as a reaction to them. Rather, "liberation" is the act of freeing up of the reserves of executive power for their unfettered use (at the expense of oversight) in the use of this power. It is the use of power such that any reflective position of analysis is already unable to penetrate and destabilize the coherence and the power contained within that action, that use. This is why criticisms of this administration tend to be after-the-fact as opposed to wide reaching, future-oriented and policy-oriented: it is hard to get a grip on any action of this administration and prepare for them because the administration has no power outside of its use. Thinking that this poor news coverage is due to the fast-paced and sensational trend in news writing and analysis only remains at the surface of this phenomenon: the administration does not "wield" power, or preserve power outside of its use, and so it is maintained in a way that remains impervious to any effort to make sense of it. This even includes the administration's own efforts.
Why? Because we aren't oriented towards power in a way that we can perceive how it wills itself, how it reduplicates itself. We are oriented towards power in such a way that we make sense of it in terms of its ability to be used. For Bush, power is only used power, or power that has, in its future-directedness (that is, in what we would call its potential or ability to be used), already effectively used (and not used up, mind you, but becoming-used)--that is, in any action that has not actually occured yet, all the wheels have already been set in motion to bring it about... there is no interim where the power is not used yet. Hence Cheney's remark on Meet the Press the last time he made an appearance there: when asked whether he would invade Iraq knowing what he knew now, Cheney replied he would. This remark appears insane if we cognize it from the standpoint of a normal analysis of power--an analysis that sees power as something caused, something held as a potential, and something eventually used in order to create an effect. As soon as we see that it is Nietzschian power, power that wills itself to power again and again, eternally, Cheney's statement becomes more sane, more in tune with a characteristic attitude of this administration. For we then understand his reply to be something other than this: "if I knew what I knew now--the lack of reasons to apply the power we held in potentia to Iraq--I would apply this power again anyway." Rather, it becomes cognizable as the following: "the chance to bring the government again to a position in which its power is used on Iraq is completely in accordance with the nature of the power that we used already on Iraq when we invaded in 2003, therefore it should be used then again, yes--the use of this power was and is inevitable, unquestionable, eternal." As soon as we get this, we will shy away from talking about this "new" trend in Bush's action, prompted by his total lack of support and the approaching end of his administration. We might begin to criticize Bush on the basis of a claim to a particular type of power (the will to power) that he factually did not employ in the bungled invasion of Iraq--his vision of his power only extends to his decisions that effectuate its use, not to the events themselves, and this is in complete contradiction to this type of power that he acts like he is using. Regardless, it is ironic that the phenomenon only has come into view due to this upcoming cessation, when it was (and should have been viewed as) always the case since 9/11.
The Times' headline sums this all up: "For Bush, Action in Libby Case Was a Test of Will". Indeed, the crucial thing here is will. But, for Bush, there are no "tests" of a will that wills only itself again to power, a will that is eternally willing itself.

Some music...

...that is awesome: saw Christian McBride at the Village Vanguard last night. Check him out.

A recent op-ed on Guantanamo...

Morris D. Davis' Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday was disturbing, to say the least. One should view it as an example of what Slavoj Zizek said in his own recent Op-Ed on torture--not because there is torture at Guantanamo, but because Zizek argues that there is a "normalization" or tolerance of policies that necessarily lead to activities like torture rampant in American discourse. We wouldn't consider fify years ago whether torture was acceptable or not in any US-operated prison, he says. Now, we do. And this consideration, this allowance of disgusting ideals into discourse is what prompts their tolerance: those who are beyond morality (those who no longer think about torture as an issue but merely as a deed to be dutifully carried out) coopt moral discourse into considering their position in order to respond to it. Thereby their (what we would call) amoral position is rendered legitimate, rendered as a reflection on morality. And this is enough to undermine morality in itself simply because their position just isn't moral--it doesn't concern itself with the same morality. It should be noted that Zizek does not conclude we should shut these "amoral" others up, but that we should mark their speech as of another morality--thus their position within discourse can be accurately discerned, and their ability to coopt ours becomes limited.
Regardless of whether Zizek's view is right or not, what becomes interesting about this is that we can make sense of an article like Davis'. Through what seems a cynical viewpoint at first, Zizek leads us eventually to the point where we can go beyond him and can assert that this "normalization" of amoral issues is merely the effect of people like Davis trying to crush dissent or honest debate on the issues of torture and (what is more important) rights generally. Witness Davis' attempt to quash debate on accusations that prisoners at Guantanamo are tried using hearsay evidence:

There is no ban on hearsay among the indespensible rights listed in the Geneva conventions. Nor is there a ban on hearsay for the United Nations-sanctioned war crimes tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Nuremberg trials also did not limit hearsay evidence. Simply stated, a ban on hearsay is not an internationally recognized judicial guarantee.

Besides the utter insanity of the comparison between a Guantanamo prisoner and Adolf Eichmann that the reference to Nuremberg (half a century ago!) invites, what is happening here is that Davis is normalizing a point of view that is hostile to basic human rights by subordinating them to the coherency of his portrait of Guantanamo. This is a throwaway paragraph. But it does the dirty work of insinuation, of degradation. The subject matter of the article itself--Davis' equally insane implication that because the conditions of the prison at Guantanamo are excellent, it makes detaining an enemy combatant there (who has not been given a chance to say whether she or he was wrongly accused until the belated event of her or his trial) is in compliance with any common-sense idea of legality--this subject matter is completely tangential to these remarks on hearsay: in the article, Davis has just made his point that hearsay is (supposedly) not admitted into trials of detainees. Why speculate on whether the admission of hearsay in a trial is an internationally condemned practice?
Simply because it buttresses his position. The insinuation is that you are wrong for questioning the United Stats on the issue of the legality of Guantanamo, and that, furthermore, you are wrong about your own knowledge of internationally recognized human rights. In short, your common sense is wrong--any revulsion you might have to hearsay itself is suspect. Regardless of the validity of this perspective it is obvious that the effect is to call into question whether hearsay should be a right of a detainee if she or he wouldn't get it at Nuremberg--and merely by considering this question, we are already on our way to accomodating things like torture. But what doesn't matter here are the effects of whatever side you are on: for Davis, and for many people in politics nowadays, it seems that the question of what side you are on is more valuable. This is the scary thing about the article: in an effort to defend the Bush administration's policies, it is willing to attack even our most common-sense values.