I recommend – strongly – that you get Gene Healy’s new book The Cult of the Presidency. (Due out in late April - check www.catostore.org).
Healy carefully documents that, although Bush II may be one of the worst offenders in abusing executive power, he is not the first by a long shot.
The tradition dates back at least a century to Theodore Roosevelt and includes most Democrats and Republicans since then. Healy makes a very strong argument that Americans have come to view the presidency as a sort of secular national messiahship, and that most occupants of the office from Teddy on have fanned this belief and used it as cover for increasingly-widened powers, at the expense of limited government and civil liberties.
The ultimate problem, Healy seems to be saying, is not who occupies the presidency but the very nature of the office as seen by most Americans today. Most of us want the president to solve every problem, or at least “respond” to every problem, and that requires widening the power of government in general and the president in particular. FDR openly admitted when he took office in 1933 he would be asking for domestic powers equivalent to the wartime powers of commander-in-chief.
So, if you think calculating evil is a recent development in the Oval Office, take a closer look at the last 100 years. Woodrow Wilson persecuted opponents of the Great War. FDR sent Japanese-Americans who were U.S. citizens to concentration camps, after seizing their property. LBJ gave us the Vietnam War, in which many more people died than in the Iraq War. Nixon of course gave us Watergate and assorted other Machiavellian criminality.
The precedent for presidents over the last century has been bad, unless you happen to believe a president with virtually unlimited power is a good idea. Many people do – so long as it’s “their guy” with the power.
That’s demented, in my opinion. The end result of this is always a Caesar, or worse.
We need to un-set the precedent. We should either place new, stringent restrictions on the president via constitutional amendment or adopt something like the Swiss plural presidency (they have 7) in which a committee exercises executive power. The committee members act as equal checks on each other.
The election of Obama, Clinton or McCain will do nothing to change the current situation, despite the fervent belief of their passionate supporters.
Lord Acton pointed out that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The nature of the office virtually guarantees corruption. The president now has a wide array of arrogated powers and patronage, virtually-Congressional-oversight-free command of the most sophisticated and well-armed military in the world, and control of a vast intelligence network centered in the CIA and NSA.
That’s a heady, imperial mix. It defies common sense to believe that anyone – other than a few long-dead saints – could resist the temptation to use that power extensively. And indeed, hardly any president has resisted the temptation during the last century.
America’s founders designed the office of president for people like Cincinnatus, not people like Caesar. We need to revisit that sentiment and re-set the precedent because history teaches us that after Caesar comes Caligula.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Heaven help us
Hillary Clinton, quote from today’s NY Times: ‘“We need a president who can restore our confidence,” she said. “We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.”’
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/politics/25campaign.html?_r=2&ref=politics&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
If memory serves, that’s what Benito Mussolini, Juan Peron and Antonio Salazar were all about – being chief commanders of their economies, along with such other fine folks as Stalin and Mao (and numerous minor tyrants).
Which begs the question, what does this make Hillary?
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/politics/25campaign.html?_r=2&ref=politics&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
If memory serves, that’s what Benito Mussolini, Juan Peron and Antonio Salazar were all about – being chief commanders of their economies, along with such other fine folks as Stalin and Mao (and numerous minor tyrants).
Which begs the question, what does this make Hillary?
Thursday, March 13, 2008
A Buddhist Video Interview
Sally Quinn at the Washington Post interviews religious leaders. Short videos of the interviews are posted on their website.
To view one from my Nichiren Buddhist SGI lay association, click on the link below and scroll down to Bill Aiken and click on his name:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sally_quinn/2007/12/divine_impulses_a_video_interv.html
Bill is a longtime practitioner and currently SGI-USA national public affairs director.
If you're interested in finding out more about Nichiren Buddhism, based on chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, visit the national website at http://www.sgi-usa.org/
To view one from my Nichiren Buddhist SGI lay association, click on the link below and scroll down to Bill Aiken and click on his name:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sally_quinn/2007/12/divine_impulses_a_video_interv.html
Bill is a longtime practitioner and currently SGI-USA national public affairs director.
If you're interested in finding out more about Nichiren Buddhism, based on chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, visit the national website at http://www.sgi-usa.org/
Monday, March 10, 2008
A Cultural Change
Ask around among your friends and see who's actually read the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Even among Baby Boomers, putatively better educated than generations since, it's only a minority. Some years back, a poll was done to discover what Americans thought of the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights.
When given verbatim reading of one or another of the first ten amendments -- minus identification of where it came from -- a surprising number either thought the protected right shouldn't be protected or, worse still, thought it was somehow communist.
Is this because most people are inherently stupid?
No, the answer lies in our culture. Americans are exceptionally poorly educated, thanks to our government monopoly elementary and secondary school system. Results include a culture that places more importance on American Idol and the personal life of Britney Spears than on American government and the daily abuse of power by the executive and Congress.
In fact, with the general ignorance of the Bill of Rights, most Americans would likely not notice most of their rights being taken away.
If it were not for a small minority of libertarians and civil libertarians, both major parties, and their special interest group allies, would have long ago scrapped the Bill of Rights. They've been chipping away at it furiously over the years, especially during the last eight, but consistently for several decades.
Ultimately, it will require a change in culture, a rejuvenation of widespread interest in how the government works and how much power it has, to change this state of affairs. The "progressive" solution of giving government even more power will result, eventually, in autocracy just as the ancient Roman Republic ended, as several democratic Greek city states ended, and as the French Revolution ended.
Our culture - with amnesia about what happened last year, much less last century or a couple of millenia ago - has to change if we want to stop a headlong rush into a new age of imperial autocracy followed by a new Dark Ages.
But for the moment, we seem quite unconcerned about it all.
When given verbatim reading of one or another of the first ten amendments -- minus identification of where it came from -- a surprising number either thought the protected right shouldn't be protected or, worse still, thought it was somehow communist.
Is this because most people are inherently stupid?
No, the answer lies in our culture. Americans are exceptionally poorly educated, thanks to our government monopoly elementary and secondary school system. Results include a culture that places more importance on American Idol and the personal life of Britney Spears than on American government and the daily abuse of power by the executive and Congress.
In fact, with the general ignorance of the Bill of Rights, most Americans would likely not notice most of their rights being taken away.
If it were not for a small minority of libertarians and civil libertarians, both major parties, and their special interest group allies, would have long ago scrapped the Bill of Rights. They've been chipping away at it furiously over the years, especially during the last eight, but consistently for several decades.
Ultimately, it will require a change in culture, a rejuvenation of widespread interest in how the government works and how much power it has, to change this state of affairs. The "progressive" solution of giving government even more power will result, eventually, in autocracy just as the ancient Roman Republic ended, as several democratic Greek city states ended, and as the French Revolution ended.
Our culture - with amnesia about what happened last year, much less last century or a couple of millenia ago - has to change if we want to stop a headlong rush into a new age of imperial autocracy followed by a new Dark Ages.
But for the moment, we seem quite unconcerned about it all.
Friday, March 7, 2008
On The Media
NPR produces a weekly program called On The Media with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. It's a news program about how journalists are reporting the news. Think book reviews written by authors of other books and you've got a general idea.
Not that it's a bad show. Sometimes it can be excellent, but affiliate stations tend to run it off-prime time. In radio, "prime time" is 6 am - 10 am (when people are commuting to work) and 3 pm - 7 pm (when people are commuting home) and Saturday from 8 am - 12 noon when people are puttering around the house.
Invariably, On The Media is broadcast very early Saturday morning, when no one except Buddhists are awake, or on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when no one is listening to radio except Met opera fans, and only from December to April.
Surfing to the On The Media webpage today, I was not amazed to find stories and comments about the now-ending love affair journalists have had with Barack Obama. Likely that skit on a recent Saturday Night Live made it untenable for news folk to continue. But On The Media has done their part, comprehensively examining the phenomenon and wondering what it meant.
What it meant, of course, is that people who write stories in magazines and newspapers, or report stories on radio and television, are not necessarily any less prone to silly behavior than the rest of us. Objectively, there is a strong case to be made that many journalists were treating the Senator from Illinois with especially soft kid gloves.
Maybe they thought Hillary was not smart enough to notice. They were wrong.
A good friend of Sam is a gentleman down in Alabama named Glynn Wilson who runs an online newspaper and blog called Locust Fork World News. Glynn does some good things, like campaigning against the continued imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was targeted by the Gonzales Justice department and sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
Glynn also epitomized, and still epitomizes, the fascination of a certain segment of the media with Obama. Even before running an editorial endorsing Barack, he was obviously very favorable to him, to the extent of interpreting Obama's primary streak, ended this week, to mean that there would be a landslide Democratic victory this fall and that the country would move farther left than at any previous time since FDR.
All of that was wishful thinking, in Sam's opinion. But it was an extreme expression of what many in the media and the entertainment industry long for: a real life re-enactment of West Wing, during which the problems of the country and world are solved by brilliant, lefty wonks with lots of funding for new social programs and tons of warm fuzziness.
Well, the Democratic race is still on and is getting as ugly as the most partisan Republican could have hoped, defying the media's fairly blatant attempt to manipulate it into a revival of Camelot. But the good news is that people like Brooke and Bob will be looking more closely at their colleagues than ever before.
Perhaps now the media will start questioning the basic assumptions found in the policy prescriptions of McCain, Obama and Clinton that envision an even larger role for government meddling in human activities.
Brooke and Bob can wonder if just the way questions are framed assume certain things.
The most basic assumption that needs to be challenged, and which has not been since the time of FDR, is that the government needs to "do something" about every conceivable human problem.
The evidence of the 20th century should have put that idea to rest. But, in their own peculiar way, journalists are the most conservative of people, refusing to give up a pet belief until there is not only overwhelming evidence against it, but overwhelmingly overt evidence.
One prominent example of that would be the absolute astonishment of many, maybe most, American journalists when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Sober-eyed economists like Milton Friedman had long predicted it (and predicted it would mostly have to do with the internal rotteness of the system, not outside military pressure).
It took the actual, very public collapse of the Soviets to wake up newspeople to the inherent immorality and corruption of coercive collectivism. But in recent years many seem to have forgotten, as they continue to give warm coverage to collectivist ideas from Obama, Clinton and McCain, without questioning the basic assumption, without asking the question, "But why should the government be doing anything about this -- in a constitutional federal republic?"
Maybe Brooke and Bob can begin asking questions about why their colleagues aren't asking that question.
Not that it's a bad show. Sometimes it can be excellent, but affiliate stations tend to run it off-prime time. In radio, "prime time" is 6 am - 10 am (when people are commuting to work) and 3 pm - 7 pm (when people are commuting home) and Saturday from 8 am - 12 noon when people are puttering around the house.
Invariably, On The Media is broadcast very early Saturday morning, when no one except Buddhists are awake, or on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when no one is listening to radio except Met opera fans, and only from December to April.
Surfing to the On The Media webpage today, I was not amazed to find stories and comments about the now-ending love affair journalists have had with Barack Obama. Likely that skit on a recent Saturday Night Live made it untenable for news folk to continue. But On The Media has done their part, comprehensively examining the phenomenon and wondering what it meant.
What it meant, of course, is that people who write stories in magazines and newspapers, or report stories on radio and television, are not necessarily any less prone to silly behavior than the rest of us. Objectively, there is a strong case to be made that many journalists were treating the Senator from Illinois with especially soft kid gloves.
Maybe they thought Hillary was not smart enough to notice. They were wrong.
A good friend of Sam is a gentleman down in Alabama named Glynn Wilson who runs an online newspaper and blog called Locust Fork World News. Glynn does some good things, like campaigning against the continued imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was targeted by the Gonzales Justice department and sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
Glynn also epitomized, and still epitomizes, the fascination of a certain segment of the media with Obama. Even before running an editorial endorsing Barack, he was obviously very favorable to him, to the extent of interpreting Obama's primary streak, ended this week, to mean that there would be a landslide Democratic victory this fall and that the country would move farther left than at any previous time since FDR.
All of that was wishful thinking, in Sam's opinion. But it was an extreme expression of what many in the media and the entertainment industry long for: a real life re-enactment of West Wing, during which the problems of the country and world are solved by brilliant, lefty wonks with lots of funding for new social programs and tons of warm fuzziness.
Well, the Democratic race is still on and is getting as ugly as the most partisan Republican could have hoped, defying the media's fairly blatant attempt to manipulate it into a revival of Camelot. But the good news is that people like Brooke and Bob will be looking more closely at their colleagues than ever before.
Perhaps now the media will start questioning the basic assumptions found in the policy prescriptions of McCain, Obama and Clinton that envision an even larger role for government meddling in human activities.
Brooke and Bob can wonder if just the way questions are framed assume certain things.
The most basic assumption that needs to be challenged, and which has not been since the time of FDR, is that the government needs to "do something" about every conceivable human problem.
The evidence of the 20th century should have put that idea to rest. But, in their own peculiar way, journalists are the most conservative of people, refusing to give up a pet belief until there is not only overwhelming evidence against it, but overwhelmingly overt evidence.
One prominent example of that would be the absolute astonishment of many, maybe most, American journalists when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Sober-eyed economists like Milton Friedman had long predicted it (and predicted it would mostly have to do with the internal rotteness of the system, not outside military pressure).
It took the actual, very public collapse of the Soviets to wake up newspeople to the inherent immorality and corruption of coercive collectivism. But in recent years many seem to have forgotten, as they continue to give warm coverage to collectivist ideas from Obama, Clinton and McCain, without questioning the basic assumption, without asking the question, "But why should the government be doing anything about this -- in a constitutional federal republic?"
Maybe Brooke and Bob can begin asking questions about why their colleagues aren't asking that question.
Monday, March 3, 2008
No More Saviors in the White House
Let's revisit Michelle Obama’s recent statement, cited in the Cato@Liberty post repeated here last week: “Barack Obama … is going to demand that you shed your cynicism… That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
The problem that I have with Ms. Obama's statement -- the same problem that I have with the attitudes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- is that it shows a kind of insipient arrogance that has taken over the leading politicians of this country. Heavens knows George Bush has his share, or more than his share, of it.
While Ms. Obama did not reference "forcing" Americans to do anything, the language she used should be regarded as offensive, just as I regard many statements by Clinton and McCain offensive.
In one of the Dune books, Frank Herbert gives a brief lesson on how democracy is transformed into aristocracy. One of the key warning signs he mentions is increasing arrogance on the part of the political class, a subtle elitism that eventually becomes overt.
You would have to look very hard for a leading politician today who does not show at least some of the arrogance that Herbert said should be a red flag. Positioning yourself as a secular messiah is supremely arrogant, and that is precisely what Senator Obama has done. Hillary likely thinks of herself in similar terms and anyone who's studied John McCain's career knows he is also condescending and arrogant.
A belief that Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton or John McCain, will save America is not rational. Most U.S. presidents have, at least since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, positioned themselves as saviors who would lead us to the Promised Land. Seems logical someone would have succeeded by now, but as we have seen the most prominent results of this historical trend has been a century of war and increasing repression of individual rights.
The problem is not "electing the right people to office" but, rather, the wide range of power that U.S. presidents in particular, and Congress as well, have arrogated to themselves. (Bush's lawyers, in court defending his abritrary detention of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, went so far as to claim that in "wartime" the "commander in chief" could pretty much ignore any law or the Bill of Rights if he chooses. Think about the implications of that.)
Maybe Obama or Clinton are so decent they would never abuse the office the way Bush has. Maybe. But maybe not. Power has a strange effect on people, like a personality-altering hallucogenic. Go to DC sometime and tour K Street and the Capitol area and see the addicts.
The framers of the Constitution -- who'd had it up to here with arbitrary executive power courtesy King George and his despotic royal governors -- deliberately and severely limited the power of the president, of Congress, and of government as a whole. They added on the Bill of Rights for good measure. This was undone by the bloodless coup d'etat FDR carried out in the 1930s. (His chief henchmen later admitted, in so many words, that what they'd been up to was subverting the intentions of the framers and the limits on power in the Constitution.)
Those original limits are all in tatters now. Even more frightening is that the media and the public generally do not understand this.
The presidency has been allowed to accumulate too much power. FDR sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. Truman signed off on experiments on African American servicemen. Nixon and Kennedy used the IRS against political opponents. Bloody, expensive wars became the hallmark of American foreign policy during the 20th century.
I worry deeply about someone with a savior complex in the office of president. FDR had such a complex, so did LBJ. I worry deeply about someone who wants to be nanny for 250 million individuals in the office of president. I worry deeply about someone who doesn't think free speech rights are as important as having a "clean government," as John McCain has stated on national television.
So, yes, Michelle Obama's comments are troubling. Ms. Obama is highly educated, a successful attorney, and doubtless looked on in her own right as a role model by many younger women. Her comments speak to a culture of dependence on government and deference to government, not a culture which cherishes individual liberty and responsibility.
The bottom line is that, although George Bush will thankfully leave office next January 20, none of his three putative successors -- upon close examination -- offer anything different. None are offering to reduce the power of the presidency, or reduce the role of the federal government in individual lives or renounce the fool's errand of America as world policeman. None are offering anything, in fact, but a further expansion of bureaucrats nosing into our lives, and attempting to run them for us, in some way.
Our current president, George Bush, was not the first mass-abuser of executive power. Given that we do not seem to be examining politicians very closely yet, he won't be the last. And remember, he seemed pretty innocuous at first, before 9/11. Many people thought Bush was a dimwit, but figured that the worst thing that could happen would be looting taxpayers on behalf of Halliburton and the oil companies.
Not even close. But the warning signs were there in remarks Bush made on the campaign trail and in the advisers he surrounded himself with, most notably Rove and Cheney.
We must start looking at politicians exceptionally critically. The election is not American Idol, where the winner gets a recording or film contract. The winner ends up in the presidency, which can now, thanks to FDR, visit untold mischief on the country and the world.
No more saviors in the White House; inevitably, they turn out to be anything but.
The problem that I have with Ms. Obama's statement -- the same problem that I have with the attitudes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- is that it shows a kind of insipient arrogance that has taken over the leading politicians of this country. Heavens knows George Bush has his share, or more than his share, of it.
While Ms. Obama did not reference "forcing" Americans to do anything, the language she used should be regarded as offensive, just as I regard many statements by Clinton and McCain offensive.
In one of the Dune books, Frank Herbert gives a brief lesson on how democracy is transformed into aristocracy. One of the key warning signs he mentions is increasing arrogance on the part of the political class, a subtle elitism that eventually becomes overt.
You would have to look very hard for a leading politician today who does not show at least some of the arrogance that Herbert said should be a red flag. Positioning yourself as a secular messiah is supremely arrogant, and that is precisely what Senator Obama has done. Hillary likely thinks of herself in similar terms and anyone who's studied John McCain's career knows he is also condescending and arrogant.
A belief that Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton or John McCain, will save America is not rational. Most U.S. presidents have, at least since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, positioned themselves as saviors who would lead us to the Promised Land. Seems logical someone would have succeeded by now, but as we have seen the most prominent results of this historical trend has been a century of war and increasing repression of individual rights.
The problem is not "electing the right people to office" but, rather, the wide range of power that U.S. presidents in particular, and Congress as well, have arrogated to themselves. (Bush's lawyers, in court defending his abritrary detention of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, went so far as to claim that in "wartime" the "commander in chief" could pretty much ignore any law or the Bill of Rights if he chooses. Think about the implications of that.)
Maybe Obama or Clinton are so decent they would never abuse the office the way Bush has. Maybe. But maybe not. Power has a strange effect on people, like a personality-altering hallucogenic. Go to DC sometime and tour K Street and the Capitol area and see the addicts.
The framers of the Constitution -- who'd had it up to here with arbitrary executive power courtesy King George and his despotic royal governors -- deliberately and severely limited the power of the president, of Congress, and of government as a whole. They added on the Bill of Rights for good measure. This was undone by the bloodless coup d'etat FDR carried out in the 1930s. (His chief henchmen later admitted, in so many words, that what they'd been up to was subverting the intentions of the framers and the limits on power in the Constitution.)
Those original limits are all in tatters now. Even more frightening is that the media and the public generally do not understand this.
The presidency has been allowed to accumulate too much power. FDR sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. Truman signed off on experiments on African American servicemen. Nixon and Kennedy used the IRS against political opponents. Bloody, expensive wars became the hallmark of American foreign policy during the 20th century.
I worry deeply about someone with a savior complex in the office of president. FDR had such a complex, so did LBJ. I worry deeply about someone who wants to be nanny for 250 million individuals in the office of president. I worry deeply about someone who doesn't think free speech rights are as important as having a "clean government," as John McCain has stated on national television.
So, yes, Michelle Obama's comments are troubling. Ms. Obama is highly educated, a successful attorney, and doubtless looked on in her own right as a role model by many younger women. Her comments speak to a culture of dependence on government and deference to government, not a culture which cherishes individual liberty and responsibility.
The bottom line is that, although George Bush will thankfully leave office next January 20, none of his three putative successors -- upon close examination -- offer anything different. None are offering to reduce the power of the presidency, or reduce the role of the federal government in individual lives or renounce the fool's errand of America as world policeman. None are offering anything, in fact, but a further expansion of bureaucrats nosing into our lives, and attempting to run them for us, in some way.
Our current president, George Bush, was not the first mass-abuser of executive power. Given that we do not seem to be examining politicians very closely yet, he won't be the last. And remember, he seemed pretty innocuous at first, before 9/11. Many people thought Bush was a dimwit, but figured that the worst thing that could happen would be looting taxpayers on behalf of Halliburton and the oil companies.
Not even close. But the warning signs were there in remarks Bush made on the campaign trail and in the advisers he surrounded himself with, most notably Rove and Cheney.
We must start looking at politicians exceptionally critically. The election is not American Idol, where the winner gets a recording or film contract. The winner ends up in the presidency, which can now, thanks to FDR, visit untold mischief on the country and the world.
No more saviors in the White House; inevitably, they turn out to be anything but.
Gridlock is Best
What would be the best scenario for 2009? Gridlock.
History has shown us that when different parties are in control at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, partisan egoes work to minimize the damage the federal government can do. That certainly was the case during Clinton's last six years in office, not to mention the era of Dick Nixon.
Conversely, under FDR, LBJ and Bush junior, control of both branches by the same party gave rise to the worst possible abuses on any number of fronts.
This probably translates to John McCain with a Democratic Congress, although Hillary with a Republican Congress might be more fun to watch.
History has shown us that when different parties are in control at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, partisan egoes work to minimize the damage the federal government can do. That certainly was the case during Clinton's last six years in office, not to mention the era of Dick Nixon.
Conversely, under FDR, LBJ and Bush junior, control of both branches by the same party gave rise to the worst possible abuses on any number of fronts.
This probably translates to John McCain with a Democratic Congress, although Hillary with a Republican Congress might be more fun to watch.
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