E-Mailgate

My brilliant friend E and I both have birthdays in March and we try to get together for an annual birthday lunch at the Palm. This week, when we finally managed to get together, we were discussing how Bush simply has no experience, at the federal level, dealing with a co-equal branch of government. (When SCOTUS has told him "NO" (as, Goddess knows, they should have done in 2000) he and his lapdog Congress have simply ignored SCOTUS.)

Today, E calls my attention to Sid Blumenthal's very good article in Salon concerning the Bush administration's too-cute-by-half practice of doing their dirty work on non-governmental servers in an effort to prevent Americans from knowing what their government is doing. (I've trademarked the name for this scandal, E-Mailgate, and I predict that it, rather than torture or warrantless spying, is what will bring Bush down. It's a bit like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, but, at this point, I agree with Victor Anderson: "White magic is poetry; black magic is anything that actually works," and I've quit holding out for white magic. I just want Bush gone.) But it's the closing paragraph of Blumenthal's article that I think is most striking. He says:

For six years, Bush had a Republican Congress whipped into obedience -- and it provided him his only experience in legislative affairs. The rise of the Democratic Congress, reviving the powers of oversight and investigation, is a shock to his system. But he is not without an understanding of his changed circumstances. Bush sees the new Congress as the same beast that ensnared his father in fatal compromise and as a monstrous threat to the imperial presidency he has spent six years carefully building.

As the return of oversight suddenly exposes pervasive corruption throughout the executive branch, Bush struggles against Congress as though it were an alien force. Bush has no sense that the Framers, wary of the concentration of power in the executive, deliberately established the powers of the Congress in Article I of the Constitution and those of the president in Article II.

Today's NYT makes a similar point discussing Bush's reaction to the Democratic demand for a timetable in Iraq: Americans expect to see the disaster in Iraq brought to an early and responsible end.

President Bush’s reaction was instantaneous, familiar in its contempt for views that do not follow his in lockstep, and depressing in its lack of contact with reality. Mr. Bush threatened to veto the spending bill needed for this year’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than accept language calling for most American combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq sometime next year.

Earlier this week, as I blogged, the NYT discussed Bush's refusal to shut down Guantanamo and said: It was distressing to see that the president has retreated so far into his alternative reality. The NYT, as I noted, was a huge cheerleader for Bush's War in Iraq, so when they begin to call him out of touch with reality every couple of days, you know that he's in trouble.

What's funny is that, when he was first running for office, the spin was that Bush had done such a good job of working with Democrats in Texas, that he was a uniter, not a divider, yadda, yadda. Blumenthal seems to think that Bush came to the WH planning to overthrow the three-separate-but-coequal-branches model that our Founders put in place, but I have to wonder if it didn't happen as an emotional reaction to the fact that he's known all along that he wasn't legitimately elected. Either way, it will be quite something if our form of government is saved, in the end, by the fact that Karl Rove thought it was cute to use his RNC Blackberry rather than the WH computers.

And, since the Bush junta hasn't been using them, those computers better all have their "H" keys intact come January 20, 2009.