All the President's Confessions

By G. Pascal Zachary, AlterNet. Posted December 23, 2005.

Bush's advocacy of lawlessness lies at the heart of the right-wing agenda to remake America.

Bush's statement last Saturday that he ordered domestic spying, knowing it was possibly against the law to do so, was an astonishing confession in the annals of American history -- and the defining moment of Bush's tortured presidency. Why, after all, would the president open himself to the possibility, however remote, of an impeachment proceeding?

If American presidents stand for anything, it is deniability. This is the prime directive of presidential authority. More than 50 years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who invented the Imperial Presidency and presided over the country during World War II, avoided leaving a paper trail of his most sensitive decisions. Even his order to build an atomic weapon was vague. "O.K. - FDR" is the only surviving record of his ever having granted authority for what turned out to be the most expensive and secretive project in American history.