The Great Writ

As Barack Obama continues his efforts to codify what he has described as the Bush administration's ad hoc responses to terrorism, one particular category of people proves especially nettlesome: "those we cannot try or release." In other words the presumed guilty. In other verbal mood and tense, those who, if we were to try them, we would have to release. By and large, it would seem that the evidence against this class of prisoners is so scanty and, where it does exist, so questionably obtained, that it wouldn't even be possible to obtain an indictment.

In the past week, Dick Cheney, our erstwhile Nosferatuan Vice President, has taken to the airwaves to denounce Barack Obama for . . . continuing the policies put into place by Dick Cheney. Liberals are of course outraged, and the manufacturing of consent rolls right along. Cheney's omnipresence gives Obama's prevarication an air of valedictory thoughtfulness, and it certainly appears to be working, as even many of the President's critics on the left seem to believe that he is trying to figure out what to do rather than figure out how to sell what he is already doing. Cheney is meanwhile accused of constructing strawmen, which of course he is, but at the same time we should credit him with more honesty than the endlessly circumlocuting Obama. Cheney repeatedly makes the same point: that we must forgo legality in pursuit of security. It's a bad argument, but it is not disingenuous on its central point. The so-called existential danger that motivates the argument doesn't exist--it should be needless to say. But Cheney is nonetheless straightforward in his advocacy of a military exemption to the laws and statutes of the United States.

Obama on the other hand is arguing that we must forgo legality in pursuit of security while giving the convincing appearance that we are not doing precisely that. We should abandon the legal structures that have governed the trial and prosecution of wrongdoing for over half a thousand years now, but we must do so while making glorious noise about American principles and what America stands for and all that. George W. Bush, in the latter years of his presidency, also moved his rhetoric in that direction, which is why so many opinionists now identify a certain . . . continuum between these two regimes. Cheney has remained resolutely on the dark side, as he once infelicitously put it, and if he is a moral monster, he is at least honest in baring his fangs. Cheney says that we must do terrible and vicious but necessary things. Obama says, look over there, the Constitution! And while your back is turned, he drops the keys to the dungeon down a storm drain and snags a few wallets.