Facts are no longer theories

Michael Savage, the Globe reporter who broke the story about the extensiveness of Bush's "signing statements" -- and won a Pulitzer for it -- has written a book about the imperial presidency that Bush/Cheney have cemented. And whether you're on the right or the left of the political aisle you must be disturbed by what he concludes:

In the case of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and other post-9/11 legislation, the Bush administration did not need to resort to complex legal maneuvers or secret directives to get what it wanted; it was handed broad new authority by Congress. Mr. Savage writes that among that act’s momentous provisions were ones that “delegated to the president alone the power to decide whether any particular coercive interrogation technique was prohibited,” and “stripped the courts of the power to hear lawsuits based on the Geneva Conventions.”

Further, he says, the act “locked down the president’s power to arrest U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and imprison them in a military brig without a trial if he or she thinks they pose a terror threat.”

At the end of this chilling volume Mr. Savage offers a concise and powerful conclusion: “The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history — not controversies but facts. The importance of such precedents is difficult to overstate. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once warned, any new claim of executive power, once validated into precedent, ‘lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition embeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.’

“Sooner or later, there will always be another urgent need.”

It will be a long, long time before the rancid toothpaste of these power mad cretins will be made to be put back in the tube.