Reductio Ad Principe De Petrus

     The Bush administration has been an object lesson in polar similarities.  On the one hand they are consistently guilty of the principle of reductio ad absurdum.  On the other - on a more mundane or popular level – they are living personifications of the Peter Principle.  Ironically, for being controlled by two separate principles they have proven themselves surprisingly unprincipled.
     To take the first of these first – everyone agrees that there are legitimate serious concerns to be dealt with with foreign detainees in a time of war.  These are very formidable legal issues and have been handled a variety of ways, some good, some bad, and some ugly, throughout history.  George Bush has chosen the last and least of these options, the ugly one, first.  
    Reductio ad absurdum is the art of reducing (or advancing) every argument to such an extreme point of logic that it becomes an absurdity on its face and turns into a cruel parody of itself.  Bush and his supporters are artistes nonpareil at precisely this self-defeating tendency.  The entire “war on terror” has been exemplified by their recurring recourse to belligerently wild exaggeration and overreach just up to and often past the point of its inevitable reversal.
     So, the president does not just say that the rights of the prisoners at Guantanamo should be temporarily tempered and carefully weighed for the sake of present and future security and intelligence purposes and then listen to others’ ideas to craft an ethical and legal consensus.   No, he has claimed at various times, several Supreme Court decisions ago, that since he has ordered them to Guantanamo prison they are in a no man’s or no law’s land, off shore.  Because of this these detainees are entitled to no rights as human beings at all, not even a semblance of due process, forever, or never, or for the duration of this war, whichever comes first.
     Coincidentally, or not, as he denies these prisoners their rights, he conveniently draws the determination of their rights exclusively to himself for the duration of his presidency.  As incredibly indefensible as this theory of absolutism is, encompassing the seeds of nullification of our entire constitution within its elevation of executive prerogative, right wing zealots admit to no restraints on their prejudices and declare that we have “no choice” in these troubled times but to suspend the reach and ability of all and any law which might dare to rise to touch the hem of our blessed sovereign president’s robes.  This includes suspending the Constitution, gutting the courts, abrogating all treaties and moral standards, vitiating the Geneva convention, torturing at will, lying and covering up and declaring George W. Bush, George I, the first virtual king our democracy has ever known – or ever before needed.   
    Though this seems wild exaggeration, sheer caricature, actually the astonishing thing is that these neocons are serious, I suppose.  They claim, as shrilly as they can, that this is the only possible alternative which can keep every American from being murdered in their beds, perhaps this very night, by cruel godless terrorists streaming straight from Guantanamo to a city near you.
     In other words, these simpletons are the type who can see no solution to any problem but the one’s that’s most extreme – and transparently best serves their own personal narrow interests and prejudices along the way.  Or they proceed, reductio ad absurdum, to exercise or acknowledge no common restraint on their actions, continuing to overplay their hands until some outside force stronger than they are intervenes to put a stop to their endlessly far flung pretensions.
     This brings us straight to the second problem with the Bush administration – the Peter Principle, first named by a guy named Laurence Peter.  Closely akin to Murphy’s Law, of which it may often be a secret sub cause, this is the tendency in a bad bureaucracy to eventually allow every person to rise to the level of their incompetence. Think Michael Brown, Alberto Gonzalez, Dick Cheney, Paul Bremer, Don Rumseld, John Yoo, David Addington and yes, even George W. Bush – as well as many others too numerous to mention in this crony filled administration.  
     Never has our government been inhabited simultaneously by so many extremists and ideologues who quite literally have no earthly idea what they are doing and have apparently risen so far above the ceilings of their own limitations as to make them dangerously incompetent in the functioning of their offices.  They are risen so far above their own capabilities, like scared cats up a tree, as to not now be able to find their way back down to ground so, in their disorientation, they keep trying to climb higher. 
This tendency to unchecked extremism (ad absurdum) by people who are incompetent at their positions (a la the Peter Principle) goes far to explain the profound and unprecedented unpopularity of the Bush administration.
     This is the deep background to the recent Supreme Court decision narrowly rendered against the Bush administration, granting the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
     The real issue in this decision on which the decision hinges is not the rights of the detainees but the right of the president to unilaterally determine what those rights shall be.  When he claims the congress or courts have no rights to intervene or question or help determine the adjudication of those prisoners he is not so much claiming constitutional guarantees do not apply to them as he is claiming that (in Cuba at least) constitutional responsibilities can not be applied to him.  The real crux of his intent does not rest with saying that these prisoners are outside the protections of our law, but to claim in this instance that he stands above any limitation our laws should try to impose upon him.
     Despite the hysterical misrepresentations of the critics of this decision it is not an extension of law, judicial activism or the creation of new law.  It is about bringing our arrogant president back under the color of our old law and back into the fold of the constitution which he is claiming he has stepped out from under and can no longer be considered to govern his actions.
     This is not a new theory with him.  Ultimately George Bush has claimed in a whole series of legal rulings that though the constitution initially provided him with his authority as president, that authority is so broad that in parlous times it grants him the authority to abrogate any authority the constitution might exercise over him.  In other words, he claims he is greater than his creator. 

Reductio ad absurdum.