Myopia (mine)

[pecunium]

Bertie has (though I forget it sometimes... I am not free of tunnel vision) a more damning statement than the torture paragrapgh.

He thinks the President is the law.

Ponder that.

It's a staggering claim, the authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Inherent. Part and parcel of the office is the ability to set aside the laws. If the President says do it, it isn't a crime. If the law says do it, and the President says don't, that isn't a crime either.

Forget Nuremburg. Forget Nixon (though he tried that gambit) forget the Rule of Law (how can one who is able to set a law aside, break one? The don't apply). Forget the consent of the governed. Forget the Magna Carta.

The President is above, nay, beyond the law. He defines it. He is the same, in effect, as Louis XIV. "L'Etat, C'est Moi"

Everyone should recoil. Republicans should be apalled. Democrats should be disgusted. Libertarians should tremble with righteous indignation.

But all of us should step back and think on it.

The proposed head of law enforcement for the United States has said that his boss answers to nothing but his sense of right and wrong.

I recall a previous leader of the people of America who thought that. His name too was George; George III.

Comments

most Americans believe the mythology of the Revolution

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

just as they tend to accept that Monarchy = Bad King John out of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages. It's more cultural shorthand than anything else

And the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers does rather lend itself to that, and we've lost the context of the hyperbole that would have been there in the day - when a future historian reads us, will they think that Cheney really ate babies and had improper relations with goats? Will more sophisticated ones think that we really believed it ourselves?

I mean, I seriously doubt, based on what I've read, that quartering in Boston was more onerous than the Ottoman Empire's treatment of its outlying provinces in the 1700s...

But the "Read the Declaration" meme as a way of protest, and speaking past the Moral Values rhetoric on a level that Joe Smoe can grasp, is one I've seen more and more recently, and despite the source polemic's exaggerations, inaccuracies, and the dilemma of working with rather than correcting its rhetoric, I think it a good one.

Re: most Americans believe the mythology of the Revolution

[pnh.livejournal.com]

All revolutions have mythologies. Making good use of them is part of effective politics. I'm not remotely disputing that.

My point is that not even George III, bogeyman of the mythology of the American Revolution, professed the level of absolutism claimed by Alberto Gonzales on behalf of the head of state.

Yes, the eighteenth century did see some last-ditch attempts by European rulers to claim pharaonic power. Like the Bush Administration, these were outliers in the general scheme of things. By and large, the history of Western Europe is a history of executive authority being constantly checked, first by the demands of feudalism, then by such agreements as the Magna Carta. Mostly, our culture doesn't go for unfettered god-kings. That's how alien the ideology of the Bush Administration is. As The Poor Man observed, Alberto Gonzales thinks the Magna Carta is liberal pablum. These people think feudalism is suspiciously left-wing. (Feudal lords, after all, have obligations to those sworn to them.)

Re: most Americans believe the mythology of the Revolution

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It was hyperbolic. It was, as bellatrys points out, a use of the revolution mythology to make a point.

I don't think George III actually believed he had that level of power (the last British monarch to attempt even a version of that claim was probably Charles I, and he didn't come to a great end either, but not many will immediately bring said end to mind if I mention him... and it lacks punch).

George III certainly thought the colonies had fewer appeals to process than home counties.

TK