[Peace-discuss] None dare call it fascism?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Harvey C. Mansfield (known as "Harvey C-minus Mansfield" to generations 
of Harvard students) has been a joke for years, but we don't need 
Charlie Chaplin to remind us that in the 20th century jokes were often 
taken seriously in politics.  --CGE]

	The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"
	Right-wing Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield makes explicit
	the literal rejection of American constitutional values by the
  	Bush movement.  --Glenn Greenwald | May 02, 2007

The Wall St. Journal online has today published a lengthy and truly 
astonishing article by Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield, 
which expressly argues that the power of the President is greater than 
"the rule of law."

The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive -- 
Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for 
Energy. And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting 
in the President the power to override and ignore the rule of law in 
order to receive the glories of what Mansfield calls "one-man rule."

[...]

Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media 
arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments -- the 
dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in 
the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard -- receive almost 
no attention.

While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain 
American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on 
Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, 
and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the 
President's will, our media still barely discusses those issues.

They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and 
which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some 
painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's 
dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical 
theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not 
apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving 
national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to 
demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/02/mansfield/print.html

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