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the claims concerning executive privelege are obviously feints in a political game being played with congress. it is in the context of this game that the administration's carlschmitt legal philosophy still twitches about, not quite dead simply because it is in this context that the giant sucking sound that guyy alludes to above has no real consequence....
but i cant imagine why this move would be abstracted from its context and set up as some kind of definitive statement concerning where the bush people actually are politically in any wider sense. what i can see as potentially problematic is the possibility that there'd be another "terrorist attack" right about now...but this would put the bush people on the par with the fln in algeria a decade or so ago, which would stage massacres in order to pin them on the islamic salvation front (fis)...which is of course the Problem that the bush people's absolute incompetence has created for them...even if they were in fact committed to running the schmitt philosophy to its logical conclusion and wanted to use a new and improved "state of exception" to install themselves as Leader, as Decider, their political credibility is so shot in the country as a whole--not to mention internationally--that i dont think they could pull it off.
on the other hand, it seems sometimes that folk are so committed to forgetting that their everyday lives unfold within a political context that maybe they could pull off such a move--even if it would require an Occasion of pretty huge proportions. folk seem to prefer to pretend that the debacle in washington is background noise floating about a surface that in all other ways is normal. were this state of affairs otherwise, the "political problems" the bush people have created for all of us would be a political crisis. but it isnt--not really--because we--all of us--do not seem to be able to quite cope with what that would entail. it is easy peasy to allow yourself to be sucked into the stream of immediate events and tasks and loose yourself there. the political world is very big, beyond your control, while your living room and the tv at its center is small and you can control the living room by playing with decor and reality by turning off the tv set.
so sometimes it seems like we are practicing for that eventuality, getting used to it, adjusting the degrees of avoidance that would be required to move from being able to pretend that everything is normal now to the more athletic types of evasion that would be required to continue pretending everything is normal under an extreme rightwing dictatorship.
but that we the people would in all probability just hide in our domestic routines were this to happen and do nothing does not mean that the bush people are in a position to walk into that possibility. IF things move in a straight line from where they are now, there is no chance that it'll happen. they really do need another "terrorist" attack.
at that point, the carpet would meet the linoleum.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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