In
Search of an Empire without an Emperor:
Dynamics Behind the Comey Firing
By
Sam Husseini
May 11, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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In a very
short amount of time, it's become
something of cliche to talk of Trump's
firing of Comey as the equivalent of
Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre,
in which Nixon fired anyone at the
Department of Justice unwilling to fire
the Watergate independent prosecutor.
If
that does turn out to be an apt analogy,
it's hardly surprising that this is
happening in many respects.
The crimes of Watergate came out of the
Vietnam War, though this is poorly
understood. The Watergate “plumbers“
were originally set up to plug the leaks
about the Vietnam War.
And so, with the rise of the imperial
presidency, it was hardly surprising
that someone like Nixon would use the
mechanisms of Empire -- the capacity for
secrecy, for surveillance and for
violence -- for his own political
purposes. Indeed, Hoover, atop the FBI,
had been doing so for decades.
The late Watergate historian Stanley
Kutler writes in his book Abuse of
Power that Nixon railed to his aides
about papers regarding the Vietnam War
that he thought were at the then liberal
Brookings Institution.
“I want it implemented…. God damn it,
get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
The documents Nixon apparently wanted to
get hold of allegedly showed that
Johnson curtailed the bombing of Vietnam
in 1968 to boost the Democrats’ election
prospects of winning the election that
year.
A great irony now is that the
establishment Democrats are going after
Trump in a number of personal ways, but
collude in others, and indeed stiffen up
his use of violence. When Trump uses
military violence in Yemen or Syria, he
is lauded by presumed liberals like Van
Jones and Fareed Zakaria as
presidential.
Johnson was thought to curtail bombing for
political gain. Trump now gains politically
when he engages in bombing.
The U.S.
establishment seems to want an Emperor who will
go around the world spying on people and killing
them as he sees fit, but want to make sure he
abides by legal niceties in the U.S.
The obsessiveness over secrecy and the
intense “principless“ partisanship give
us a situation where the political
factions spew allegations to the public
that are at best difficult to discern,
even if you follow politics full time,
much less if you're trying to hold down
a regular honest job.
This leads to a political culture based
on loving or hating various political
figures, or just checking out of
politics, which much of the political
establishment may want for large sectors
of the public.
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The secrecy and the surveillance are
sold to the public as necessary for
their own protection, but the opposite
is true. The little known Katharine
Gun case
highlights how the actual target of
surveillance is frequently not
"terrorism", but the threat of peace.
So, the Trump administration's
ridiculous claims about the reasons for
the Comey firing are fairly similar to
the lying pretexts that U.S. officialdom
used to justify the Iraq invasion.
Empire is compatible with democracy only
with a series of dehumanizing triple
standards. It's fine there, just don't
do it here.
After all, the main victims of the Iraq
invasion were the Iraqi people, and they
are off screen and the officials who
inflicted horrors on them have all
walked away nice and clear.
The mechanisms of Empire are tolerated,
until someone like Trump seems to be
using them for his own personal ends.
In terms of
Trump's own crimes, he is quite
impeachable on the domestic
emoluments clause,
but the establishment Democrats seem
quite uninterested in pursuing that.
They have focused on his apparent ties
to Russia. There may well be something
there, Trump is a corrupt figure and
it's well within his capacities to
engage in massive, if at times possibly
buffoonish, coverup. But it is
incredibly dangerous that the
establishment Democrats seem intent on
risking escalations with the other major
nuclear power on the planet so they can
beat Trump over the head.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
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