I miss the days of smoke-filled rooms when crooked pols chose corrupt presidential candidates who were approximately sane. Today we have a sort of presidential bus-station lottery. We choose as ruler any beer-hall putz who can shake hands and grin his way successfully through New Hampshire. This, plus the deep rot of the American political framework, is allowing the rapid conversion of the United States into something previous Americans would hardly recognize.
Permit me a foray of a paragraph into psychojournalism. It fascinates me to know that George Bush was a male cheerleader at Andover. Yes, it could have been worse. He might have been a table-dancer. But most of us who were in high school when he was recognize that you either came to watch football, or you came to watch the girl cheerleaders. There was something odd about a boy who wanted to be one.
We are ruled by a male cheerleader who favors torture. I wonder what things twist in the inner fog.
“Ricky, Ricky he’s our man. If he can’t do it, nobody can. Goooooooooooo Plesiosaurs!”
Given a president who seems chiefly concerned to display his indomitable manhood, the question arises: What restraints keep him from absolute control of a formidably armed nation of three hundred million? The Constitution, noblest of fables, was designed to do just this. But absent the will to enforce them, checks and balances do not exist, and laws, principles, and constitutions mean nothing. If no one says “no,” the president simply behaves as he wants. The genius of the strange little man in the White House has been to recognize this, to divine the weakness of the American political order.
When he wanted to attack Iraq, he simply lied, and lied again, and shifted his ground and lied again. It worked. When he didn’t want to follow the Geneva Conventions in his treatment of captured Iraqis, he just declared his prisoners of war not to be prisoners of war. Torture? He just did it and faced down the country and the world. Disregard of civil rights? Spying? He just did as he chose.
Here is the great discovery of the little man who doesn’t read. America is not the land of the free, nor of the brave, nor of the politically sentient. Nor is it a country of laws or of principles. It is a country of those who just do as they want. A president can do anything he chooses. Who will tell him no? Nobody has.
Today there is speculation as to whether he will make war, perhaps nuclear war, on Iran. The universal assumption seems to be that if he wants to, he will just do it. The legislature, already having given up its authority to declare war, seems to regard the military as the private guard of the president. Is it not interesting that one dim, pugnacious, ignorant little man can bring on nuclear war all by himself?
When Mr. Bush gets caught lying or breaking the law, he shows no embarrassment, contrition, or sense of having done anything wrong. He seems to have no conception of right and wrong, of principle. He is not accustomed to being told “no,” and accepts no constraints on his power. All that matters to him is that he get his way. He gets it.
Where will this lead? Obviously, to vastly increased police powers. But I wonder. If, down the pike, Bush announced that to protect us from terrorism he would have to postpone the presidential elections and remain in office—what would happen? Suppose he came up with a bit of supportive theater. If just before the elections something blew up, and were attributed not to the CIA but to Terrace, what then? The Reichstag has burned before. The public, the congress, the judiciary are so very, very easily manipulated. All it takes is the will to do it.
And that the little man has.
A tribal rite in the column racket is the discovery of darkness in the hearts of predidents, or witlessness, and we discover away industriously. I have done my share. I thought Clinton a bright, libidinous lout, Jimmy Carter a moralizing cipher, Reagan a sort of Grandfather Barbie and, by contrast, Eisenhower a wise man hiding behind remarkable syntax. None was evil, or mad. Bush is something new in presidential politics, genuinely dangerous and genuinely out of control. The time is ripe for him. America no longer has the institutional defenses to say “no.”
What would happen if a president just refused to go? To remove him, someone would have to act. Who? Little would be necessary to stop a coup, granted. A couple of helicopters of Marines landing across the street from the White House would be enough. The various federal police bully civilians well (ask Steve Hatfill), but would find fighting real men another thing. But who in the military would have the courage to do it?
Would the public do anything? I doubt it. The Born Agains would support him, the suburban Christians suck their thumbs and wait, blacks ignore the matter, conservatives see it as necessary to stop Tersm, and most people would watch football on television. The necessary strength is not in the country. The timbers are rotten.
A popular uprising I cannot imagine. Who would rise? Overweight people with Volvos do not become urban guerrillas. Again, conservatives, who tend to be armed, rank among the most ardent supporters of Mr. Bush. In any event, how does one rise? Would upset semi-heterosexual professors at Cornell hold a Take Back the Night march? Oh joy. After three days the vigilists would become bored. Back to the television set.
The Supreme Court certainly would, and could, do nothing. The court consists of insular antiquities who so far have shown no disposition to stand up to Bush. The termites have hollowed the judicial woodpile.
Congress? It does what is paid to do, by anyone. What could it do? Some might say that it could shut off funding. With the threat of imprisonment at its collective head? It would huff, fumble, and hold committee hearings. But a coup would have to be squelched immediately or not at all.
My impression is that much of the public wants authoritarian rule, or would be perfectly content with it if it even noticed its arrival. No, I can’t prove it. But what do most people care about beyond television on screens that grow ever larger, beyond porn, beer, and the competitive purchase of grander SUVs? I ask this not as a lifelong curmudgeon being tiresome (though doubtless I am both) but seriously. Who in a sprawling TV-besotted country cares about the Constitution? A comfortable police state is after all comfortable.
I do not predict that the reigning curiosity will stage a coup (which should it occur would not be a coup but “an emergency measure,” necessary to protect us from Terrace). I do say that what is happening today is unlike anything that has happened before, and that people do not always see what is coming. If you read books from the Germany of the 1930s, you will find that people were uneasy, divided, unsure of things, but had no idea just what the squatty little man with the voice had in mind for them. He just did it. The unimaginable does sometime occur. We notice only afterward.
©Fred Reed www.FredOnEverything.net
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Zoro said,
October 11, 2006 at 10:53 am
Malakas said,
Zoro, What exactly is your point? If you disagree, then why not respond intellectually to Fred’s views and make your case by being equally articulate in the English language? You’re probably afraid to do that because Fred, a world-traveller with a wide experince of life, is a past master.
Instead you resort to crude homefolks-stuff about your experiences with drinks.
That’s the really great thing about Demaarcracy. Your vote and Fred’s are just the same.
October 11, 2006 at 12:59 pm
PolishKnight said,
Looking back, GW is not really that much more imposing than FDR and Wilson were when they fought wars including: internship of the Japanese-American population, attacks by private citizens against German Americans during WWI, forcing children to say the pledge of allegience (”you have the freedom to pledge to a flag OR ELSE!”), military drafts, open censorship of the press, reading people’s mail, etc.
Which goes to show that if we had the left back in the times of WWII, history might have turned out a lot differently. Oh, wait, the nazis were “right wing fascists”. The difference between a “right wing” fascist versus a “socialist” is that Hitler killed Jews while Stalin killed far more Slavs. The former is unforgivable to the modern left.
October 11, 2006 at 1:03 pm
chas said,
October 11, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Will Malven said,
Hangin’ around in bars exchanging rude remarks with his sycophantic “compadres” and fat subservient senoritas has softened his brain.
This tirade against President Bush, filled with little lies as it is, like his last couple of screeds, reeks more of an acoholic’s temper tantrum than it does of the wry wit of the iconoclast Fred used to be.
Fred, your boring, better sober up and begin going to AA.
October 11, 2006 at 4:20 pm
DadWithGirls said,
The real dry-drunk is in the White House, and everyone knows it by now.
But I do take issue with Senior Reed because he dismissed The Shrub as an infantile simulacrum and then at the same time exalted him to imperial status.
I believe Fred took a wrong path in his political logic as to the graveyard that American democracy has become.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Bush as President or Kerry or Edwards or Hillary or McCain.
All of the potential heirs to the Big House on the slave plantation are pimps, liars, bought-and-sold corporate whores.
Bush the cheerleader-boy-man can make more money as an ex-Prez than he can by trying to extend his term in office.
There’s another martinet of faux-democracy in the holding pen.
And another, and another.
Americans are a hard-working, exceedingly gullible sheeple, yes?
There will be no overt coup.
It is completely unnecessary.
The last election proved that.
October 11, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Zoro said,
Fred is right about the US being, I suppose, vunerable for a president that wants to extend his term a few years. But Fred likes to have it both ways. By this I mean that he often demeans the conservative base, i.e., the very people trying to maintain some fidelity to the Bill of Rights. President Bush, with all his warts, is defending the country. Fred sees this as bad. Why shouldn’t he, he’s safe in Mexico.
Fred Reed dislikes feminists intensely (so do I ) but then complains that we have a president that took the war, in a red-blooded American male way, to the enemy and is trying to kick in their teeth.
Fred Reed laments about Bush torture, the Geneva convention and war lies, but it really sounds as though he’s describing Bill Clinton during Kosovo, a man who mostly got a pass from Mr. Reed at the time.
And you are mistaken, Malakas, to think that I am intimidated by Fred Reed’s world traveler and world experience credentials. By the time I was twenty years old I had lived in three countries and sixteen cities. My first passport was issued to me in 1953, when I was three months old and still sucking my mother’s teat. By 1959 I had made two round trips, USA-Europe, on a KLM Lockheed Super-Constallation. I have been to asia numerous times. I lived in Ankara, Turkey for three years. I have been all over Europe and to Russia, Poland (twice). In 1997 I drove to Minsk, Belarus from Switzerland and was nearly knifed by some local mafia type in the hotel bar in Minsk because I refused his, er, invitation to buy him two packs of cigarettes for the right to drink in “his” bar.
I have had more drinks, jokes, discussions and arguments with so-called foreigners in their own countries than most people. One of the reasons I like Fred Reed is because of his experiences in the world, not in spite of it.
October 12, 2006 at 2:42 am
Will Malven said,
Fred said:
“When he wanted to attack Iraq, he simply lied, and lied again, and shifted his ground and lied again.”
It is FRed who is “lying.”
“When he didn’t want to follow the Geneva Conventions in his treatment of captured Iraqis, he just declared his prisoners of war not to be prisoners of war.”
Terrorists Fred, not Iraqi soldiers. The Geneva Conventions do not cover terrorists, never have. In fact in 1984 the proposal to do so was rejected by the nations of the world.
“Torture? He just did it and faced down the country and the world.”
What “torture” is that Fred? I have heard about a lot of unpleasant treatment, but nothing that amounts to torture, at least not by the traditional definition.
“Spying? He just did as he chose.”
Uhh, Fred, spying is at the least a misnomer and at worst a deliberate attempt to mislead. No one was “spied” upon with the possible exception of those who were in direct contact with terrorists.
“America is not the land of the free, nor of the brave, nor of the politically sentient.”
Funny Fred, you are the only one who seems not to be politically sentient and you are in that bastion of political freedom Mexico. I bet the troops in Iraq would have a few things to say to you about who is brave. Feeling pretty brave down there in Mexico behind those Tequila shots aren’t you?
Well that accounts for two paragraphs, you want me to go on Dad?
Seems to me that Mr. Freddy has the typical Liberals contempt for all Americans. Well that’s understandable, just because he made his living off of our people doesn’t necessarily mean he should respect them.
Afterall he made his living from those same people actually reading what he wrote. That’s not very discerning of them.
October 12, 2006 at 9:55 am
DadWithGirls said,
I submit this as Exhibit No. 1 as to why there will (likely) never be a real, powerful, united, potent, political, known, public, capable, feared …
MEN’S MOVEMENT.
Why should any feminist with chops and political clout in D.C. be concerned about a “threat” from a marginal population of self-immolating ‘Net testosterone-enhanced voices that love the back street puke-on-a-screen fights more than the actual, difficult cause?
Kim Gandy at N.O.W. must read this site and many other MRA outposts just for comic relief, and self-assurance.
Just a tad bit of data - N.O.W. claims 50,000 active female members and they have forced through Congress yet another legal assault against men in VAWA 2005.
That’s what — .01% of American females?
(Maybe they claim 500,000 — who cares?)
700 rad fems showed up this past Summer in NYC for N.O.W.’s 40th Anniversary bash and they got NATIONAL media coverage!
Gender-political math is a bitch, apparently.
Kim’s latest cocktail joke goes like this –
“How many MRA’s does it take to change a lightbulb?”
(Answer — ???)
October 12, 2006 at 3:56 pm
nighthawk said,
Geneva Conventions? Fred obviously has no clue what they are for. He obviously has no idea how torture is defined.
Well, this probably isn’t worth posing a comment for.
So I keep reading and find:
“federal police bully civilians well (ask Steve Hatfill),”
Now this is truly funny!
Fred, why don’t you ask Randy Weaver?
October 12, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Will Malven said,
Focus! It’s not hard, just try reading what is written and attempt (I know it’s difficult for you) to stay on target.
October 12, 2006 at 8:09 pm