Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Great stuff, a real two-fer!

Not only the "tallest building in Yreka" argument (which President in 65 years hasn't been an atrocity on two legs?), but the screaming erroneousness even there. Bad as they all were, no chance in hades Zerobama is the least heavy anchor. Truman opted not to fuck with Iran. LBJ signed the CRA and VRA, and did a few things that reduced poverty. Carter was a wipe-out, but had the courtesy to do the sabotage job slowly and poorly.

The existence of the presidency is a pretty good litmus test for the liberalism of progressive beliefs. The actually existing office is most useful for imperialism, facilitated looting and centralized police control of the citizenry. It's as much an impediment as the senate, if not more, when it comes to anything positive.

No no no... The presidency is the great joystick for all goo goos. If we can only get our hands on it we can do much for the little peeps. It's right there, almost in my grasp. Just one more step and...

Alarm goes off.... Another cold gray day....

Why does Rachel think "the presidency" is a good thing

She probably sees it as a potential counterweight against corporate power.

if no one can even conceive of the president winning fights when his party is in the majority, let alone the minority in Washington, then the presidency itself starts to atrophy

But she's not even phrasing it that way, the presidency as a check to corporate power. She's looking at it as a partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans.

If you look back at the 1912 election, however, you realize that there was not one, not two, but three political parties all trying to paint themselves as "progressive." Even after Teddy Roosevelt left the Republicans, they still had figures like Charles Evans Hughes, moderate progressives.

Now both parties are vying for the label "conservative."

It's really a Hobson's choice. Weaken government and you do nothing to weaken the corporations. But strengthen government, and you give it two parts power to prop up the corporations for every one part you give it to limit the corporations.

I don't have the answer. But obviously Maddow doesn't either.

which President in 65 years hasn't been an atrocity on two legs?

2010 - 65 = 1945

The Pentagon and the Manhattan Project

I know he's a pretty mainstream writer, but has anybody read "Bomb Power" by Garry Wills?

He argues that the modern presidency is just the institutionalization of the Manhattan Project.

It sounds simplistic but he really makes a compelling argument.

"Simon Johnson, and the two A-students agree that the tax cuts are a bad thing because they will increase the deficit. Do we laugh or cry?"

Owen may disagree, but that clueless knob really needs to sit down and STFU if you ask me. Despite his supposed metamorphosis, he's still secreting the same old IMF poison.

Simon's deficit knobbery is pure sanctimony. It can't have escaped him that countries who reject the IMF's toxic prescriptions do much better. Or, hell, maybe it can.

FB, wasn't he edging towards Stiglitz territory a while back? I could swear he was sounding like a reformed, thoughtful technocrat who was trying to reclaim his soul.

I was never fooled by Simon Johnson. That's not to say that I necessarily had him figured out. I'm just constitutionally incapable of trusting a man with these eyebrows:

http://johnbatchelorshow.com/imAGES/simon_johnson_200.jpg

No matter how much he talks about a TBTF tax, I just can't shake the sense that he is planning on paying off the deficit through yet another one of his underpants schemes. I've told him a million times that depriving every man, woman and child of their undergarments will not improve the economic situation, but he just won't hear it. And I've never liked the way that he looks at my drawers.

Those eyebrows are criminal. No wonder he would up in the IMF.

The underpants scheme is shocking. I think I know how he cooked it up too. This Democratic Party economist has been seen trying to recruit people. Johnson quite naturally jumped on the bandwagon.

Robert Rubin! I should have known that he was behind this scheme.

[Wills] argues that the modern presidency is just the institutionalization of the Manhattan Project. It sounds simplistic but he really makes a compelling argument.

Here is an even more compelling review:

Discussing American clandestine (and to him morally unjustifiable) programmes of sabotage, subversion and assassination, Wills remarks: 'It may be said—it has been said—that all governments do these things. But the United States had not done so in any systematic way before the period after World War Two. And other countries do not have the United States constitution.' The crimes committed by the US government are less excusable than the crimes of 'other countries', it seems, because they represent a collective disregard for the country's better self. What torture, rendition and indefinite detention without trial desecrate, in other words, is not the constitution as ordinarily conceived but the constitution as embodying the moral innocence that Americans supposedly once enjoyed.

That an irreverent critic of American myths, and one as knowledgeable as Wills is about the universal narcissism of tribes and nations, feels drawn to the idea of American exceptionalism is revealing. His patriotism is penitent, not smug, but it nevertheless rests on a strong asymmetry or moral non-equivalence between the US and other nations. Perhaps the crimes committed during the last 65 years by American governments in the name of national security are a result not of the invention of weapons of unimaginable destructiveness, but rather of a deeply ingrained way of seeing the world, a belief in America's ineffable connection to truth and justice, shared by no other people, which even the country's most contrarian critics cannot shake off.

"No no no... The presidency is the great joystick for all goo goos. If we can only get our hands on it we can do much for the little peeps. It's right there, almost in my grasp. Just one more step and...

Alarm goes off.... Another cold gray day...."

nonny excellent

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ToT:
"the modern presidency is just the institutionalization of the Manhattan Project"

exactly
the emperor must have his death star
and the death star must have its emeperor

simple simon johnson"...still secreting the same old IMF poison."

fb i agree

Garry Wills? Seriously?

Admittedly, this is my own usual grindstone I'm about to mention, but what if the "modern" Presidency is the product of television and the corporate priorities behind it? That strikes me as at least as powerful as Wills' one liner.

Indeed, I can't even think of what Wills must be arguing. What is it? Something about inventing the a-bomb first necessitated all that followed? How is that argument even made?

Aside from deflecting attention from the screaming awfulness of the U.S. Constitution and its naked implantation of Kings into allegedly Representative Government, how does Wills imagine that the war crimes after 1945 were any different than those before 1945? Hawaii, Cuba, Haiti/DR, Philippines, Nicaragua, WWI. All and more were run on essentially the same basis as post-1945 stuff.

The bomb merely permitted more freedom of action.

Okay, I looked. Bomb Power is special pleading of the worst kind. (And exactly par for the Garry Wills course.)

The secrecy is necessitated by the imperialism, not the weaponry. And the imperialism is necessitated by the economic system.

Shit, everybody and their sister knows how to make the Bomb, and knew it within a very few years of the Manhattan Project.

This is kid stuff, and Garry Wills is a joke.

This is a bit of a tangent, but in his latest book, and on the media tour promoting same, Will is presenting himself as .... an outsider!!! Sorry, can barely type...laughing too hard, near tears.

The secrecy is necessitated by the imperialism, not the weaponry

True but the atomic bomb was obviously built to guard the American empire.

So it's a chicken/egg thing.

I guess you could also argue that Wilson's Red Scare was the key year and not 1945.

But I do think it's reasonable to argue that between the Civil War and Wilson or 1945, it was possible to use the power of the Presidency to limit corporate power.

I think Maddow's mistake is to believe it's STILL possible.

This is a bit of a tangent, but in his latest book, and on the media tour promoting same, Will is presenting himself as .... an outsider!!! Sorry, can barely type...laughing too hard, near tears.

He's not Noam Chomsky but he's arguing, in contrast to Rachel Maddow, that Leslie Groves, not James Madison, is the architect of the modern presidency, that the military industrial complex gave it a new logic/rationality after the construction of the Atomic bomb and the Pentagon.

This seems to be a sort of compliment to the argument that Chalmers Johnson makes, that the bases the American military has built all over the world has created political dynamic that exists to maintain the bases and the nukes.

It neglects class in favor of an institutional/bureaucratic critique. But it would explain how the logic of imperialism seems, at times, to defy even the interests of the ruling class.

But it would explain how the logic of imperialism seems, at times, to defy even the interests of the ruling class.

Leaving Wills aside, that's something very much worth considering. Class solidarity doesn't necessarily protect class interest.

The point that the old Moor kept coming back to was that every ruling class reaches a point in history when it is so nutty it can't even protect it's own interests. Eventually, the nuttiest faction moves out in front, and through sheer force of firepower and cash buyoff generated stupidity, dashes everything humanity has built to pieces. Socialism or barbarism? They opt for barbarism. Clearly it's not in their class interests, but they no longer possess the presence of mind to care.