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Tomgram: Elizabeth de la Vega, The State Spies on the Union

State of the what? Let's see, 28%, 31%, 33%, 35%. That pretty much sums up the State of the President -- or, at least, of his ever more dismal approval ratings in four of the latest major polls (and don't even mention his state of approval in similar nose-diving polls abroad). Only two Presidents, on the eve of a State of the Union Address have ever scored lower -- and one was Richard Nixon at 26%, seven months before he resigned his Presidency. (The other was Truman at 23% and mired i! n the Korean War.) Unbelievably enough, those aren't even the worst figures around for this administration. Try 26%, 29%, 29%, 30%; that's about how many Americans now think any presidential State of Iraq plan or strategy makes the slightest sense according to polls by Newsweek, CBS, the Washington Post/ABC News, and NBC/the Wall Street Journal. A little lower and you're in the polling basement, the sort of place not normally accessible even to a bunker-busting President.

Basically, if the networks didn't cut off all prime-time programming for the State of the Union Address, I suspect that the percentage of Americans bothering to listen to George W. Bush's words might prove infinitesimal. After all, as the latest polls all essentially indicate, but Mark Murray wrote of the NBC/WSJ poll, "Nearly two-thirds of Americans appear to have given up on success in Iraq and also on [George Bush's] presidency."

In fact, we would undoubtedly do better to stop listening to any of the official words of this administration, since they bear next to no relationship to administration acts. This State of the Union Address, which will be analyzed to death in the press and on TV, matters not a whit. Never has an administration reached for its dictionaries faster or more often to redefine reality to fit its needs. Seldom has the media spent more time parsing (and then generally passing on) words that were meant to do little but promote fantasies, escape responsibility, and confuse the public. It's the acts -- all aggrandizing, all aimed at promoting the unfettered power of a President and Vice President who never learned the word "enough" -- that matter, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, shows in exploring the latest administration maneuvers to slip past any congressional or judicial oversight of, or responsib! ility for, its illegal program to spy on Americans.

If you want to read some words that do matter, check out De la Vega's remarkable new book, United States v. George W. Bush et al., which, in the form of a hypothetical indictment of the President and his key officials and fictional grand jury testimony, brilliantly dissects the way the administration used language to defraud the Congress and the American people into war in Iraq. This Tomdispatch book is, as Chalmers Johnson has said, "Much more powerful than the 9/11 Report. A tour de force." (You can order it either from Amazon or directly from Seven Stories Press, its independent publisher, but whatever you do, don't miss it.)

Now, as a bow to the real state of our tattered, battered union, which will go unaddressed tonight, Tomdispatch turns to de la Vega to explore a few of the acts for which this administration should be held responsible. Tom.

Lying and Spying

How the Administration Slip-Slides Away
By Elizabeth de la Vega

I hope I can be forgiven if animal images kept coming into my mind during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week. On the eve of the first such hearing to be held by the newly-elected Democratic majority, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Committee Chairmen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa) announcing that, henceforth, the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program would be conducted under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Listening to Alberto Gonzales "answering" questions about this development during the hearing, the thoughts I kept having were of seals and snakes: Had the administration really flip-flopped on warrantless electronic surveillance -- like, say, a seal -- or was it merely attempting to slither away -- like, say, a snake?

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