THE PLANK MAY 18, 2009
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Conor Friedersdorf isolates a particular strand of conservative schizophrenia:
What’s truly weird is the subset of Obama critics who’ve tried to
persuade me that he is a dangerous radical with ties to terrorists, or
that he is plotting to transform the United States into a Communist
dictatorship, or that he is going to seize the guns of law abiding
Americans, or that he is an extreme leftist who cannot be trusted… and
who nevertheless argue that President Obama should continue the Bush
era practice of invoking the War on Terrorism to wield unprecedented
executive power....How can men who make these claims about Barack Obama simultaneously
insist that a country governed by him is well served by an executive
branch given expansive powers during war time? How can they insist that
he’ll end freedom in America, and defend the idea of
warrantless wiretapping? Is it credible to argue that he is a radical
opportunist who seeks the prosecution of political opponents, and
that he should have the power to order waterboarding, “walling,” and
other brutal interrogation tactics? ...Were President Obama
even half as bad as some of his critics claim, shouldn’t they be
agitating for less executive power, more Congressional oversight, and
perhaps even conclude that they were mistaken to help increase the
power of the executive branch given that they haven’t any idea who’ll
hold the presidency in the future?
--Christopher Orr
8 comments
Nice catch Chris. Either he's plotting the overthrow of the Constitution in a bid to create a totalitarian state, or he's abdicating control of the country to foreign terrorists. Bad choice, but it's hard to see how he can do both...
- Robert Powell
May 18, 2009 at 3:48pm
That's an easy one, since Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya he is not the legitimate president. Thus, the power to ease drop and waterboard reverts to the previous Vice President. Whenever the true electorate is unhappy with the result of the last legitimate election the previous holder of the Vice Presidency (the President ruled out by term limits), shall assume the office of the president, I believe it's in the Constitution.
- gflibCDL
May 18, 2009 at 4:15pm
Mr. Orr, you're presupposing that conservatism is still an intellectual movement. The rule of conservative punditry: always go with the last thing said. It makes for less messy reconciliations.
- shaw-man
May 18, 2009 at 4:24pm
Albert Einstein predicted this in his general theory of relativity. If you take all conservatives with two brains divided by all conservatives with no brains times all conservatives with less than 50% of George Bush's brain you get a black hole the size of Rush Limbaugh's stomach. It sucks down intelligence wherever it goes.
But the fiasco of the Bush administration pushed IQs so far down, thought itself could not escape,
How did Einstein miss this?
He failed to anticipate the possibility that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush would all occupy the Oval Office at the same time.
The odds of that happening were so remote, Einstein never considered it.
But: Neither did the rest of us, right?
gw
- iambiguous
May 18, 2009 at 5:14pm
The goal of the conservative movement is to enhance the power of conservatism. This is not surprising. When Gingrich was in power during the Clinton presidency, he and others had a lot of favorable things to say about he parliamentary system of government in which the legislative branch is primary. When Bush was elected, you heard a lot more about the unitary executive and the need for presidents to enhance their power during times of war. Similarly, civil rights advocates had to love Lincoln during the 1860s but had to swallow his suspension of habeas corpus. Politics is a power game. It always has been. Gerald Posner, I think, has noted that elections are less an avenue for holding powerful people in check than they are processes for allowing ambitious people to assume the levers of power absence the use of force. That might be overly cynical, but it's worth thinking about. Beyond that, you have to expect for politicians and their supporters--liberal or conservative--to press the advantage when they have it. That doesn't excuse hypocrisy, but it does help explain it. The career of Thomas Jefferson comes to mind in multiple contexts.
- propositionjoe
May 18, 2009 at 5:20pm
This is called "nigger-hating big-daddy complex".
- icarusr
May 18, 2009 at 6:05pm
Two "brains"? You're being overly generous.
- cspencef
May 19, 2009 at 11:12am
A couple of weeks ago, Conor Friedersdorf wondered how it could be that a fairly wide array of conservatives
- Anonymous
June 2, 2009 at 1:56pm