David Broder just had an online chat in which he declined several times to reveal if he had any proof of his statement that Democratic senators were unhappy with Harry Reid performance. He dodged it like a champ though, so you have to give him credit. Never say he hasn’t learned anything in all his years covering politics.
But that wasn’t the highlight for me. This was:
Arlington, Va.: Hi David. Thanks for your column on the bipartisan outcome that nobody knows about. It’s nice when we cooperate. With globalization, “high-end” scientific jobs will be subject to the same lowest-bidder competition as “low-end” manufacturing jobs. About the only work that can’t go globally to the lowest bidder are jobs that must be performed locally, like babysitting and escort services. These may end up being the “high-end” jobs in the future.
David S. Broder: I hope you are wrong. But I realize I am in one of those rare jobs that cannot easily be exported, and that is why I pay particular attention to efforts to keep other good jobs in the United States.
Do you think he sees himself as a baby sitter or a call girl? An argument could be made for either, I would say. Or both.
And is he really sure that his job couldn’t be done somewhere else?
I normally don’t have anything against Dem TV pundit Flavia Colgan, but her talking points this morning on MSNBC were just wrong. She went on and on about how George W. Bush had failed to fulfil Ronald Reagan’s legacy which is why all the candidates were trying to assume Reagan’s mantle. Then she listed all the alleged betrayals of St Ronnie.
This may be true to the extent that the Republicans are avoiding the Bush legacy like the plague, but it is playing into their hands to present some sort of “real conservative” alternative in a positive light. The fact is that both Ronnie and Junior ran up the bills so high it effectively hamstrings anyone who comes behind them. And both of them have bloody foreign legacies that should never be defended. They are far more alike than they are different and Reagan could have suffered the same fate as Bush if he had decided to be as stubborn and defiant when his poll ratings sank during Iran Contra, As it turns out he was not precisely all there, wiser heads prevailed and he was able to leave office fairly popular. But no Democrat should ever use Reagan as an example of what a good Republican looks like. That’s exactly what the Republicans would like to happen now that they’ve conceived a hagiography that has Reagan somewhere between Alexander the Great, Gandhi and Harry Houdini. (“Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan’s eyes, and in two minutes, they released the hostages.”)
More importantly, the Democrats should not ever EVER let even the tiniest bit of light between George W. Bush and his Republican enablers who now have the unenviable task of running against both him and the Democrats. This was an opportunity for the Democratic strategist pundit to place all these guys right in the laps of Junior and the Reagan Retreads where they belong and instead she gave them an out.
I hope that Dems are not going to make the foolish mistake of allowing this election to be framed as “going back to good Reagan conservatism,” because it’s nonsense. Conservatism is conservatism and it’s a miserable failure no matter who’s in charge. They all operate on the same “principles.”
Was everyone suitably impressed with all the manly, man’s-man, manliness of the Republican field? You should be.
OLBERMANN: Let’s just sit here a moment more as we watch this. And this touches on the idea of regal qualities that were not seen in South Carolina. This is the prosession, this is the parade, these are tonight’s debaters. The ten candidates, filing out, just in fact to our right. We can see them from where we are seated. There is a coronation quality that just was not present in South Carolina.
FINEMAN: Keith, if you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is, dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring. And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.
It’s true. Every last one of them had a penis while the Democrats produced at least one last week who failed to show up with one. Well, sort of. Here’s how Matthews phrased a question about Hillary Clinton to the mighty Republican sausage fest without ever mentioning her name:
“Let me ask you about something else that might be a negative in the upcoming campaign. Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the white house?”
Whew, talk about making those Republicans sweat with the hard questions! His show’s not called Hardball for nothin’. But I’m not sure I really understand why this would be such a negative. I know the Democrats “need to understand” that this stupid “we are family” claptrap has got to go, but surely the public would actually feel “reassured” that there would be one very notable, and highly regarded, white male in the white house, right? On the other hand, it’s a fine way of turning Senator Clinton into an irrelevance in her own campaign. (Very deftly done, Tweety.)
But the “old guard” that so many people find reassuring isn’t just male, is it? The Democrats had a couple of other inappropriate people on that stage last week — a brown one and a black one. (Yet another example of that ridiculous “we are family” stuff.)
I think the Democrats know very well what “the other half of the conversation” is, don’t you?
I, for one, found it extremely “reassuring” that only three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president don’t believe in evolution. And only nine out of ten said it would be a good day if Roe v Wade were repealed. Hey, it could have been worse.
Oh, and what was all that crap about a national ID card being only for foreigners? Huh?
In anticipation of the big GOP Reagan fest today, I’ve donned my Flock of Seagulls t-shirt and rented Rambo to get into the mood. Yes, I’m old enough to remember Reagan. But I was out of the country as much as possible, so the Reagan years seem to me to be a vague pastiche of exotic beverages and very, very large shoulder pads. It was quite a long time ago, after all.
It’s somewhat telling that Republicans have to go back a quarter century to find idols they can sell considering they owned the congress for the past 12 years and the presidency for the past six, but there you have it. If they have to dredge up the past if I were them, I think they should turn to Ike. He really did help save the world and they even named a smashing jacket after him. He’s certainly as relevant as Reagan is to today’s issues.
I plan to watch the debate tonight as painful as it will surely be. I’d love it if Matthews would take the trivial tack as Williams did with the Dems last week, but I don’t expect it. One would think that if they can discuss Edwards’ haircuts and Joe Biden’s gaffes in a debate they could certainly ask about McCain’s temper tantrums. I doubt that they will even near the issue of ties to corrupt, rich businessmen as they did with Obama because well, the debate only lasts an hour and a half. (And I would think it’s important to hear about Romney’s underwear and Rudy’s ferret problem. These are character issues.)But Matthews probably won’t ask any of these questions. Republicans are serious, manly people and deserve to be treated with respect.
So, this will end up being a contest for best Ronald Reagan imitator, with Matthews no doubt feeding them straight lines. (It’s too bad Rich Little bombed so badly because his Ronnie impression is actually damned good — and I think he’d make a much better president than any of these guys.)If that sounds as stultifying to you as it does to me, perhaps you can liven it up with a rousing game of Conservative Failure Buzzword Bingo! It may be the only way to get through it.
I have said throughout the Bush years that Democrats suffered from the fact that we not only had to win, but we had to win big enough that the Republicans can’t steal it. In a country that is closely divided as ours has been throughout this period, particularly in important swing states, suppressing the Democratic vote was an excellent way for GOP crooks and cheaters to win.
Accusations about voter fraud seemed to fly from every direction in Missouri before last fall’s elections. State and national Republicans leaders fretted that dead people might vote or that some live people might vote more than once.
The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.
Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.
The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.
Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they’ve gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.
Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.
With populations that don’t necessarily trust the authorities to be impartial even when the stakes are huge, asking them to run a gauntlet of legal hurdles in order to vote pretty much assures that quite a few of them won’t bother. In a cynical nation that can barely get a majority of its eligible citizens to vote anyway, you can potentially peel off a percentage or two just by making voting a pain in the neck.
You would think that nobody in his right mind would actually work to keep the country divided so they can steal elections, but you have to wonder if that played a factor in Rove’s “feed the base” legislative strategy,which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson described in their book Off Center as a conscious choice to pass bills with as few members of the other party as possible — a highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented way of doing things. This was done ostensibly to deliver to a base that they believed was large enough to win elections on its own (with the help of a handful of faux moderates who were given “backlash insurance“) as well as keep the other side looking helpless and foolish as they could never quite win anything at all, thus demoralizing their own base.
I have no way of knowing, of course, but it would be in keeping with the hubristic and reflexively dishonest Rovian approach to politics if rather than seeking to truly create a governing majority, he consciously sought to keep the electorate very closely polarized so that he could both deliver to the base and keep them engaged — and also win those necessarily close elections through the most sophisticated voter suppression machine in history. (And yes, there were probably shenanigans with the voting machines as well.)
It’s only a crackpot theory, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The man always assumed he could keep a hundred balls in the air at once. Unfortunately, his president and vehicle for this new political machine was so inept at actual governance that the Democrats were able to win big enough in 2006 that he couldn’t steal it. And now they have subpoena power.
[R]eading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based.
And that is Mansfield’s value; he is a clear and honest embodiment of what the Bush movement is.
Let me start off by saying that there are few bloggers I admire more than Glenn Greenwald. He is a genuine asset to Salon’s staff and, frankly, he deserves a far wider audience than that. Glenn makes elaborate, well-documented arguments in a passionate voice that never really loses control even when he’s clearly deeply angry at some Bush administration idiocy.
But I’d like to use Glenn’s use words “honest” and “intelligent” when referring to Harvey Mansfield as a way to examine the rhetorical schemes and scams Mansfield uses. The way I see it, Mansfield is honest the way Cheney is a crack shot (drunk or sober). And Mansfield is intelligent the way a pretzel is smart when compared to the current Occupant of the White House. But I should be clear that while I would never describe a rightwing extremist with any positive adjective, I have no bone to pick with Glenn. Harvey Mansfield’s the boner.
Here’s a few examples of what Mansfield’s up to. I’m not going to “engage” his take on history for one specific reason: there’s nothing intellectually coherent enough here to engage. There is only an utterly specious assertion of the rightwing will to power trumped up sleazy rhetorical stunts.
Let’s examine paragraph 3 of Mansfield’s essay:
In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law. Americans are fortunate to have a Constitution that accommodates different circumstances. Its flexibility keeps it in its original form and spirit a “living constitution,” ready for change, and open to new necessities and opportunities. The “living constitution” conceived by the Progressives actually makes it a prisoner of ongoing events and perceived trends. To explain the constitutional debate between the strong executive and the rule of law I will concentrate on its sources in political philosophy and, for greater clarity, ignore the constitutional law emerging from it.
Mansfield is being highly disingenuous and evasive here. Take sentence 1: “In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law.” Folks, I don’t think it’s any stretch at all to conclude from the way this is presented that this sentence is nothing more or less than a rightwingers idea of a funny haha joke. You don’t have to ask, “Well, exactly what are those circumstances, Harvey?” Anyone with half a brain can infer that Mansfield, with a certainly approahching 1, can only mean, “If Hillary Clinton was president. I could see myself defending the rule of law over a strong executive.”
But Mansfield isn’t just making a rightwing Hillary in-joke (okay, maybe it’s about Kerry, but you get the idea). It’s much more ominous than that, although he doesn’t say so outright, ’cause he doesn’t mean just Hillary or whomever is the Satan du jour of the right. Mansfield’s essay makes very little overt sense, as we’ll see. But it all becomes crystal clear when you realize that he is surreptitiously telling his audience that he would never defend the rule of law whenever a big D or a small d democrat is in power for the very simple reason that they have no legitimacy within the American government.
Mansfield pulls off this amazing stunt partly through his rhetorical emphases and omissions. It is no accident that various forms of the word “republican” – both capitalized and otherwise – occur at least 20 times in his essay, usually in an obviously positive sense. In addition, the first time the word “republic” appears is in paragraph 4 (and the term itself is repeated 16 times).
By contrast, take a look at the D word, democracy. It occurs only twice, in paragraph 16 of 28 paragraphs, ie. more than halfway through the structure of the essay. As for the word “democrat” and related forms, it occurs only five times, the first time again in paragraph 16. And here is the context for the first time the word “democratize” is used, literally overwhelmed by all those republics and republicans:
Republican government cannot survive, as we would say, by ideology alone. The republican genius is dominant in America, where there has never been much support for anything like an ancien régime, but support for republicanism is not enough to make a viable republic. The republican spirit can actually cause trouble for republics if it makes people think that to be republican it is enough merely to oppose monarchy. Such an attitude tempts a republican people to republicanize everything so as to make government resemble a monarchy as little as possible.
Although the Federalist made a point of distinguishing a republic from a democracy (by which it meant a so-called pure, nonrepresentative democracy), the urge today to democratize everything has similar bad effects. To counter this reactionary republican (or democratic, in today’s language) belief characteristic of shortsighted partisans, the Federalist made a point of holding the new, the novel, American republic to the test of good government as opposed merely to that of republican government.
If you understand what Mansfield is saying here, please stop reading right now and get thee to a psychiatrist because you are seriously deluded. In truth, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” contains more of what we on Planet Earth call meaning.
I simply have no idea what Mansfield means by a “pure nonrepresentative democracy.”* More incoherently, to Mansfield, democracy is the term used today to describe a “reactionary republican” belief. Huh? Democracy is reactionary republicanism? Furthermore, this democracy, for Mansfield, is “characteristic of shortsighted partisans” who are committed merely “to make government resemble a monarchy as little as possible,” all of which is opposed to “the new, the novel American republic.” Wha? I’ve read enough about democracy in the early United States to know that this is a truly meaningless overgeneralization (see Wilentz’s “The Rise of American Democracy”). This makes no sense whatsoever if he is talking about the United States, instead of a United States in the galaxy Glorm.
But this much is very clear: Mansfield thinks “bad effects” emerge from “the urge today to democratize everything.” And this much also is clear – whatever the hell Mansfield means by democracy and democratization, it is opposed to republicanism in his mind. And democracy is not a good thing at all.
In other words, through his rhetoric, Mansfield has literally written Democrats (and those who simply are pro-democracy) – not just the demonic Hillary – out of consideration for any defense he might give for a strong executive (if he hasn’t all but written democrats, Democrats, and democracy out of American history altogether). And he has done this not by being up front about it, ie. in what liberals would deem an “intellectually honest” manner but instead by sheer academic obfuscation and deception. His pro-forma attempt to claim towards the end that he is being essentially party neutral is pure bullshit – it is undermined by his rhetoric throughout the rest of the essay.
But wait! There’s more! Let’s go back to that paragraph 3. Notice another rhetorical trick at work. A “living Constitution” – such a nice-sounding phrase! It sounds like it’s a Good Thing so Mansfield wants to exploit the term for its warm, fuzzy connotation. It’s almost pro-life, get it? The problem is that a “living Constitution” already is a term of art that liberals use. No matter, if you truly don’t care what words mean. Mansfield simply deploys some slippery revisionary rhetoric and lo and behold! We read that a “living Constitution” entails “flexibility” which “keeps it in its original form and spirit.”
The mind reels at the numerous perversions of language at work in Mansfield’s ploy. The s-called dead Constitution (Scalia’s adjective) of the “Originalists” actually is alive because it is reified. And it’s reifiication is its flexibility! This is Newspeak put through a meat grinder designed by Derrida.
And this is only the beginning. Like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Mansfield creates a bizarre, inhuman… thing that is one third Hamilton, one third Mansfield, and two thirds Machiavelli. (Yes, I know, duh, that’s more than 100%, but that is the sense of what Mansfield does. Hamilton’s clearly just there to put American Founders lip gloss on The Creature’s puss). Let’s attend closely to what he writes here, because you might think this is Hamiltonianism. But it is not Hamilton, rather Mansfield, who insists that “energy” must require coercion. And it is not Hamilton, but Machiavelli, who insists that the best source of energy comes from an all-powerful tyrant:
Law assumes obedience, and as such seems oblivious to resistance to the law by the “governed,” as if it were enough to require criminals to turn themselves in. [Note the totally fallacious argument from absurdity: nobody ever seriously argued that.] No, the law must be “enforced,” as we say. There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton’s term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.
The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason–one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli’s expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule.
Finally, there’s this whopper. You’d be hard pressed to guess, at first glance, to know what Mansfield is talking about here, but what he’s really saying is that torture can be a good thing and so can spying on Americans without a warrant. Notice how, in order to make his argument, Mansfield uses the principle of flexible reification he defined earlier in his deconstruction – no other word is appropriate – of the term “living constitution”
In our time, however, an opinion has sprung up in liberal circles particularly that civil liberties must always be kept intact regardless of circumstances. This opinion assumes that civil liberties have the status of natural liberties, and are inalienable. This means that the Constitution has the status of what was called in the 17th-century natural public law; it is an order as natural as the state of nature from which it emerges. In this view liberty has just one set of laws and institutions that must be kept inviolate, lest it be lost.
But Locke was a wiser liberal. His institutions were “constituted,” less by creation than by modification of existing institutions in England, but not deduced as invariable consequences of disorder in the state of nature. He retained the difference, and so did the Americans, between natural liberties, inalienable but insecure, and civil liberties, more secure but changeable. Because civil liberties are subject to circumstances, a free constitution needs an institution responsive to circumstances, an executive able to be strong when necessary.
God, what a sleaze he is. Mansfield’s intention is to eviscerate habeas corpus, but he doesn’t mention that, referring only to an undefined “civil liberties.” Nor would I call Mansfield, in any sense, a clear thinker, even about his own intentions. He can’t even come directly out and say when he would defend the rule of law over that of a tyrant (Mansfield’s term, borrowed from Machiavelli ) in the United States. What he is saying is merely gobbledy gook, pseudo-postmodernism, fakery without the endearing humor of Alan Sokal’s immortal essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity .
No, Mansfield, like Joe Morecraft, like David Klinghoffer, like Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney, et al, et al, et al, is simply one more lunatic right winger with a propensity to lie and deceive, and with shit for brains.
SPECIAL NOTE FOR RIGHTWINGERS AND OTHERS WITH SEVERE COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENTS: Can a conservative be, in any real sense, “intellectually honest” or a clear thinker? Let me put this way. If Mansfield is a conservative, if Morecraft is, if Klinghoffer, Robertson, and Cheney are conservatives, then the answer is, “No, never.”
You disagree? Well then, it is up to real conservatives to rescue the term “conservative” from the rightwing lunatics who have redefined it as the ne plus ultra of intellectual dishonesty and stupidity. And that rescue begins by making it quite clear that conservatives not only place enormous distance between themselves and the extremist Bushies, but that they articulate a modern conservative philosophy of genuine intellectual merit. So far, I haven’t seen even a glimmer that such a thing is happening.
*Mansfield may be referring to a plebiscite, but who can tell? His phraseology smells like the kind of brain dead misunderstandings that abound in “intelligent design” creationism, where they rail against “Darwinists” who, say the creationists, believe that life self-organized and evolved from random processes – is a spectacularly distorted and stupid precis that bears no relationship to the reality of how evolution by natural selection actually works.
[Updated immediately after first posting to remove some comments about Glenn’s post that seemed, wrongly, excessively critical.]
Circuit City fired 3,400 of its highest-paid store employees in March, saying it needed to hire cheaper workers to shore up its bottom line. Now, the Richmond electronics retailer says it expects to post a first-quarter loss next month, and analysts are blaming the job cuts.
The company, which on Monday also revised its outlook for the first half of its fiscal year ending Feb. 29, 2008, cited poor sales of large flat-panel and projection televisions. Analysts said Circuit City had cast off some of its most experienced and successful people and was losing business to competitors who have better-trained employees.
“I think even though sales were soft in March, this is clearly why April sales were worse. They were replaced with less knowledgeable associates,” said Tim Allen, an analyst with Jefferies & Co.
In particular, the televisions showing disappointing results are “intensive sales” requiring more informed employees, Allen said. “It’s a big-ticket purchase for somebody. And if they feel like they’re not getting the right advice or are being misled by someone who doesn’t know, it would be definitely frustrating. They will take their business elsewhere.”
Who would ever have imagined that customers would want someone knowledgeable and experienced to explain big ticket electronic items to them before they lay out thousands of dollars? Any pimply faced teen-ager can do it, right? Boy, these businessmen shure r smart.
Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.
Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.
As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.
But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.
[…]
Several Democratic lawmakers expressed frustration on Tuesday that the administration had not provided documents related to the National Security Agency program, which the White House called the Terrorist Surveillance Program. They suggested that they would be reluctant to agree to a change in the surveillance law without more information from the White House.
“To this day, we have never been provided the presidential authorization that cleared that program to go or the attorney general-Department of Justice opinions that declared it to be lawful,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. “Where’s the transparency as to the presidential authorizations for this closed program? That’s a pretty big ‘we’re not going to tell you’ in this new atmosphere of trust we’re trying to build.”
Good luck with that.
Glenn Greenwald discusses Harvey Mansfield’s latest assault on American values in today’s Wall Street Journal, which dovetails nicely with the administration’s continued insistence that the rules just don’t apply to them.
The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive — Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy. And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting in the President the power to override and ignore the rule of law in order to recieve the glories of what Mansfield calls “one-man rule.”
That such an argument comes from Mansfield is unsurprising. He has long been a folk hero to the what used to be the most extremist right-wing fringe but is now the core of the Republican Party. He devoted earlier parts of his career to warning of the dangers of homosexuality, particularly its effeminizing effect on our culture.
He has a career-long obsession with the glories of tyrannical power as embodied by Machiavelli’s Prince, which is his model for how America ought to be governed. And last year, he wrote a book called Manliness in which “he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness” — which means that “women are the weaker sex,” “women’s bodies are made to attract and to please men” and “now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren’t, quite.” Publisher’s Weekly called it a “juvenile screed.”
I’ll leave it to Bob Altemeyer and others to dig though all of that to analyze what motivates Mansfield and his decades-long craving for strong, powerful, unchallengeable one-man masculine rule — though it’s more self-evident than anything else.
But reading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based.
And that is Mansfield’s value; he is a clear and honest embodiment of what the Bush movement is. In particular, he makes crystal clear that the so-called devotion to a “strong executive” by the Bush administration and the movement which supports it is nothing more than a belief that the Leader has the power to disregard, violate, and remain above the rule of law. And that is clear because Mansfied explicitly says that. And that is not just Mansfield’s idiosyncratic belief. He is simply stating — honestly and clearly — the necessary premises of the model of the Omnipotent Presidency which has taken root under the Bush presidency.
This is a psychological problem more than an ideology, perhaps even some sort of massive sexual identity crisis. When frustrated that they cannot convince the people to conform to their will, they simply force them. That is simple authoritarianism and it’s become quite the rage on the right of late, (which is darkly amusing considering their years of railing against totalitarian communism.)
We are not going to hear the end of it for a while. Their failure so total, and the embarrassment so complete, that the yearning for a rightwing tyrant on a white horse is palpable. You hear things like this every day now:
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
I guess that whole “they’re evil and we’re good and they hate us for our freedom” thing didn’t work out.
Via Brad Blog, I see that Christopher Hitchens had one of his little public hissy fits at the LA Times Book Fair this week-end.
I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s kind of touching to see a man who just became and American citizen on April 13th repeatedly call someone a fascist crackpot and demand that he be muzzled and removed for asking a question. And after a stirring defense of the first amendment too. Is this a great country or what?
Space is still available for the luncheon debate between Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative spokesman. The lunch is from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Location:
National Press Club, 13th Floor 529 14th Street NW Washington, DC 20045
202-662-7500
The failures of the Bush administration — from Katrina to Iraq — are more than a matter of incompetence and cronyism. They are a matter of ideology. The administration’s abysmal performance is rooted in the set of conservative beliefs that are at the heart of its decision-making. Conservatism has failed, and will continue to fail, because it has a wrong view of how the world works.
Heh. I think that’s just a little bit too reality based, don’t you? Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. Down with Bush, all hail Saint Ronnie of Reagan.
But it’s good to see progressives make the case. It’s true, after all.
