[Peace-discuss] Bush like fascist leaders

[C. G. Estabrook]

[As Alex Cockburn has pointed out, the comparison is inexact: Hitler was a
much better speaker.  --CGE]

	Audience gasps as judge likens election 
	of Bush to rise of Mussolini
	New York Sun - June 21
	2nd Circuit's Calabresi Also Compares 
	Bush's Rise to That of Hitler

WASHINGTON _ A prominent federal judge has told a conference of liberal
lawyers that President Bush's rise to power was similar to the accession
of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler.

"In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States...somebody
came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate
institution that had the right to put somebody in <power.That> is what the
Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power," said
Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits
in Manhattan.

"The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when
Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy," Judge Calabresi continued, as
the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday
at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.

"The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not
won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when
Hindenburg put Hitler in...

I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear
on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual," the judge
said.

Judge Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, said Mr. Bush has
asserted the full prerogatives of his office, despite his lack of a
compelling electoral mandate from the public.

"When somebody has come in that way, they sometimes have tried not to
exercise much power. In this case, like Mussolini, he has exercised
extraordinary power. He has exercised power, claimed power for himself;
that has not occurred since Franklin Roosevelt who, after all, was elected
big and who did some of the same things with respect to assertions of
power in times of crisis that this president is doing," he said.

The 71-year-old judge declared that members of the public should, without
regard to their political views, expel Mr. Bush from office in order to
cleanse the democratic system.

"That's got nothing to do with the politics of <it.It>'s got to do with
the structural reassertion of democracy," Judge Calabresi said.

His remarks were met with rousing applause from the hundreds of lawyers
and law students in attendance.

Judge Calabresi was born in Milan. His family fled Mussolini in 1939 and
settled in America. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the law professor
to the federal appeals court that hears cases from the states of New York,
Connecticut, and Vermont.

Copyright: New York Sun

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