Last night, Glenn Greenwald appeared on Bill Moyers Journal. For those of us familiar with his writing, there was really no new ground broken. It was simply supremely satisfying to see him talking sanely with Bill Moyers for a spell.
But there was one thing that stood out for me--not a new thought, but an aptly articulated one:
GLENN GREENWALD: ...it was only once I saw how radical of a war was being waged on the rule of law and our constitutional values by this administration, justified by the 9/11 attacks, that I think that political activism was necessary....
BILL MOYERS: ...all wartime presidents expand the powers of the office. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon. I mean, there's something inherent in war and the expansion of powers. Are you saying that Bush and Cheney took it further?
GLENN GREENWALD: I'm saying they took it to an entirely different level. What we have, in the last eight years, is not merely a case of individual and isolated law breaking. It's a declaration of war on the whole idea of a law itself, on the idea that our political leaders are constrained in any way by the limitations of the American people imposed through our Congress. The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist. And that I do think is quite new.
Indeed, it didn't start with 9/11. It started with Bush v. Gore, with the utterly lawless Supreme Court decision that put Bush in the White House in the first place. But Glenn puts the problem perfectlty: "The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist." And there's a term to describe a society in which that happens. We call it a "failed state."
America today is a failed state.
The country in need of our nation-building attention today is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It's the USA.
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