So bye, bye Miss American Pie

. . . And we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died.

EXTRA: For the folks who are now humming Don McClean's American Pie, the video is available here: American Pie.
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A "stain on our Nation's History" is how Senator Feingold aptly described the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which was signed into law yesterday by George Bush.

Keith Olbermann discusses the new law in this Countdown episode (see video). As Crooks & Liars notes:

135 years to the day after the last American President (Ulysses S. Grant) suspended habeas corpus, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At its worst, the legislation allows President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld to declare anyone — US citizen or not — an enemy combatant, lock them up and throw away the key without a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law. In other words, every thing the Founding Fathers fought the British empire to free themselves of was reversed and nullified with the stroke of a pen, all under the guise of the War on Terror.

George Washington University Constitutional Law professor, Jonathan Turley said:

"People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system.—The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It's otherworldly..People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I'm not too sure we're gonna change back anytime soon."

Olbermann notes the habeas anniversary, but does not ascribe any motive to the fact that the bill was signed on that particular date. Unlike Olbermann, I'm much more cynical about the Bush Administration. I believe that the signing was intentionally delayed until the anniversary, as some sort of Machiavellian "inside joke" of the Bushies. I remember reading that after the passage of the Act, that Bush issued a statement approving the legislation, not signing it, then taking off for political appearances. I wondered why the delay then. Now we know.

See also my earlier posts on this Act, Tyranny, Thy Name is US and Forget About Freedom Act (with an earlier Olbermann video on this subject).

(Via the Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars)

UPDATE: Olbermann followed up with a Special Comment on the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus. See Crooks & Liars for video & transcript. As he notes:

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived… as people in fear.

And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

Tags: Civil Liberties, Commentary, Countdown, Olbermann, Habeas Corpus, Video, Law, Music Video