Bush's Third Term? Your Livin' It...

By David Swanson

It
sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a
moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president,
had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and
dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush
still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking
endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of
taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture
it?

There's
Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating
and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at
his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary
rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim
interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture
him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with
some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from
our culture.

I
picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still
insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his
subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if
needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him
continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while
protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If
Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose,
yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We
might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the
standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget
was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that
yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of
course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his
second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars
rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush
would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all US troops to leave Iraq by
the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His
generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States
never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current
levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to
Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also
be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use
drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's
tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If
Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like
Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be
expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In
fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable
corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I
torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at least for
a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice
Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John
Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top
prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes
would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama
Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would
still be abandoned to their fate.

In
addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his
second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of
people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly
have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have
guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed
or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in
Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to
restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If
the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms
like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third
termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with
insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such
proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the
visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing
just whom he'd been talking to.

During
Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu
Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible
for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the
public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early
months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone with another
bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA
interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would
undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that
we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby
have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for
crimes they themselves authorized.

If
Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets
might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what
Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd
already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have
had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of
documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the
public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever
grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now,
here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also
an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush,
Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and
the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were
otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in
all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything
described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them
away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the
executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven
months.

Which
doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one
thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded
presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes,
lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the
obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new
Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been
strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many
progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president
and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his
doorstep.

If
we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active
and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still
wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out
before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make
all that much difference.

-- David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union
(Seven Stories Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy
from the University of Virginia and served as press secretary for
Kucinich for President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour
of 48 cities and hopes to see you on the road. Check out his tour
schedule by clicking here.