evil cheney: un-patriot

* emptywheel has finally realised that the egadministration's argument is that

" the president cannot be bound by law (international or domestic) so long as he is engaged in activities related to the war on terror. This means he can violate the sovereignty of other countries...

And it means he can violate our rights as citizens... At both the national and international level, it serves to further dismantle the relationship between citizen and state...

But the reason I'm shocked is how well the (spying) justification fits into this larger trend. The reason I'm shocked is how easily they've turned a terrorist attack into a justification to advance their anti-sovereign dogma...
No wonder they don't want to fight terror as an issue of law and order. Fighting it as a war advances their larger goals so well."

welcome to the party, emptywheel.

she continues (in comments):

Actually, I do think they're trying to get rid of the state. Otherwise, why ruin the military like they're doing? Why privatize most functions of the military and rely on mercs for military functions? There is nothing about these people--their bank accounts, their addresses, their mentalities--that are "national" anymore. And they are setting up a world in which (both economic and environemntal) insecurity is so rife that they will need to employ their own army."

that's why we love her.

as i've mentioned here before - these people (and their organizations) are supra-national, or even extra-national. this means that they can never be 'patriots' or even patriotic - because they have no allegiance to anyone or thing (even while they use faux-patriotism/nationalism as a weapon/tactic/energy source)

and further, even though we often like to think of them as racists who dont blink before killing a hundred thousand ragheads - once we accept the fact that they can't be patriots, because they don't believe in nations, including the US of A, then there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't kill americans with the same vigour when it suits their needs.

which brings me back to this post from last month where i said:

as to miguel's point that bush/cheney arent sufficiently evil (to be involved in 911) - i kinda agree that its difficult to imagine that anyone is so evil - yet it happened. someone is apparently sufficiently evil - so the only question is 'who?'.
we know that bush/cheney created a war out of cloth which has killed nearly 200,000 people, so far - so we know they are at least that evil

back to EW's point - similarly, they cant conceive of any acts being treasonous (outside of the legal definition) - becuase they don't believe in nations, not least their own. here's what i said back in january:

"you seem to think that treason is a special sort of crime - but that is only true if the perpetrator is a 'patriot'. if the perp considers themselves a global citizen, then 'treason' is just another word, another crime - and 'patriotism' is just for the rubes, something quaint like religion or the geneva conventions."

fwiw, that was an interesting series of posts and comments where i tried to tie together the institutional corruption of the military industrial complex, and the individual criminality of cheney et al - which combined give us the propensity to war, and the drugs/arms trafficking, and the general looting of the USG and the absence of any actual governing... i'll probably come back to those points soon.

(if you are interested, see here, here, here, here, and the bottom of this one - read the comments in all of them as well - at a minimum, you can see me ranting)