Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement. In signing the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act, Bush stipulated that he did not feel bound by the requirement in the law that he inform Congress of the FBI’s use of its expanded powers. (Boston Globe) Chilling enough, but it is part of an enraging and ominous — and seemingly unstoppable — trend, when placed in the context of other recent events. Consider his continued assertion that he can ignore the requirement that the government obtain warrants for wiretaps when he deems it necessary; and the ‘signing statement’ he included when reluctantly forced to accept the bill forbidding torture of any US detainee declaring he could bypass the law when in his judgment it was necessary for national security. We are talking about imperial power, about contempt for or ignorance of basic principles of the structure and function of the American government learned in elementary school civics classes. We are in for a new civics lesson — how easy it appears to be to bully oneself into a brazen Presidential power grab beyond the pale of what is allowed; how utterly unopposable it seems to be if someone in the Presidency is willing to be completely criminal; how the only recourse is not to elect someone so transparently an inept and unscrupulous fool, a faith-based airhead, in the first place.

Listen to any emphatic public statement he makes to the American people. In every case, his rationale for a nomination, a policy pronouncement, a war, is nothing but an insistence we should support it because of his conviction and his conviction alone, because he knows that such and such a nominee is a good man, because he knows that such and such represents a threat to national security, because he know that such and such is the right thing to do. Such omnipotent self-referential assertions without any reasoned argument to back them up are the province of those operating on an infantile level in which there is no distinction between wish, fantasy and reality, between belief and knowledge — yes, the province of the faith-based fundamentalist. Bush is, as Sidney Blumenthal points out in echoing Kevin Phillips, the founder of the first American religious party, institutionalizing his cognitive deficits. It is both our interactions with our significant others and our education that occasion a developmental leap away from that infantile omniscience. One can only speculate on the twisted influence growing up with his parents imposed; insofar as educational influences go, it has long been clear that he slept through most of his schooling. Let us hope the American people do not sleep through this civics lesson, or that they awaken by the first Tuesday in November…