Sunday - February 01, 2009

Bush was a reckless near-dictator; his successor is returning power to the people.

Right ... he was also Hitler and Stalin and Mao.  Anything else?

Never ends does it?

I thought you should see the left leaning Times of London and their take.  Clearly they’re in love.  What gets me though is why they think it’s any of their business to begin with. Or maybe it is.  ??

Now you wanna talk about restrictions and democracy etc. mr editor, you need to look closer to home.  You might wanna start with your own back yard.

Even conservatives (USA) have lots of serious issues with Bush. 

“Bush the dauphin lived and breathed a monarchical sense of the office” The what?  Dauphin?
Hmmm.  Clever use of words but come on.  I really doubt Bush thought in those terms whatever else he may have been guilty of.

I sure didn’t feel any less a free citizen when I left the USA (which I miss more then you folks can ever imagine)!
So then, President Bush must have become a dictator AFTER I left the country.  Is that correct? 

Please comment and tell me about the oppression I luckily escaped from.

COMMENTS

Ah, you can’t be more wrong if you tried. The real BO is the tyrant. Watch, and be very very afraid.
BO wants what he wants. Wait until he is denied. Then it will get interesting.
PS-why don’t you guys clean your own stall and we will do the same?

Richard, Carlsbad, USA

you make Bush out as an oppresser of constitutional rights. Three of what are considered our best or better presidents were far worse, Lincoln suspended the rights of habeus corpus, W. Wilson suspended free speach, FDR placed US citizens of Japanese, and some German, heritage in internment camps

thomas peters, danbury, usa

(Brits did the same re. Italians and mostly Germans. Even those who were not Nazis)

THE FOLLOWING MAY BE THE LONGEST LOVE LETTER EVER WRITTEN.

From The Sunday Times
February 1, 2009
Obama calmly buries the legacy of Mr Toad
Bush was a reckless near-dictator; his successor is returning power to the people
Andrew Sullivan

Because we live in a practical world where nothing is ever totally new, it is possible to see there is as much continuity between the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama as discontinuity. The massive stimulus package being prepped for presidential signature follows a similar, if more modest, effort by Bush. More than 140,000 troops are still in Iraq and it will not be easy to withdraw them. The war in Afghanistan grinds on. The fantastic debt of the past eight years will soon increase by an even more fantastic amount. The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay cannot simply be let go, however haphazard and clumsy their detention.

And yet there is something unmistakably different about Washington. Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution from his immediate predecessor. The constitution itself has been quietly but swiftly rebalanced by the manner and tone and executive orders of Obama.

This is a good thing. Bush the dauphin lived and breathed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his political godfather (Dick Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky you’d get an explanation later, usually dolled up in abstract pronouncements about freedom advancing or work being hard. The president, in his own mind, had only one “accountability moment”: the election of 2004. The rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power to be used with total boldness and declarative clarity. It didn’t matter that in 2000 he won fewer votes than his opponent. He acted as if he had won a landslide. As Garrett Epps recently put it, Bush “treated the White House much as Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad treated a new automobile - a shiny toy to be wrecked by racing the motor, spinning smoke from the tyres, and smashing through farmyards until the wheels come off”.

At times, Bush’s indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. One of the oddest aspects of his presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. This was dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anaemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush’s authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong.

The Decider, we eventually discovered, had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, Americans had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Buried within this was something more sinister. The events of 9/11 undoubtedly required energetic executive action, as the founding father Alexander Hamilton once described the virtue of the president. In an emergency, the genius of the American executive is its ability to act more swiftly than a parliament or Congress. But over time, we realised the following. Bush did not see his immense war powers as temporary. Because the war had no end, his extra-constitutional war powers also were now permanent. The war, moreover, was not just abroad. It also included the homeland and anyone in it. So an American citizen, Jose Padilla, was picked up at O’Hare airport, locked in a cell, tortured until he was a mental case and finally charged with much lesser offences than the government had first warned of, and he is still languishing in jail.

President Bush declared that he was the sole arbiter of the law, broke it repeatedly in wire-tapping, torturing, extraordinary rendition and detention, and dared Congress and the Supreme Court to stop him. In the end, the court did begin to hedge him back in. Congress? Not so much.

The executive claim, however, was larger than ever previously made. The battleground was potentially anywhere: your bedroom, your telephone, the security queue at the airport. The Decider was answerable only - and only retroactively - to the people, whose will legitimised him.

Now look at Obama. He has just won an election victory more profound than any Bush did, and by a much larger margin. And yet what one senses is restraint. This president, one recalls, is a constitutional lawyer and a deliberative fellow. He began life as a community organiser, a role that seeks to facilitate rather than to dictate, to provoke others to take responsibility rather than seizing it always oneself.

And what the critics misread in his sober inaugural speech was its classical structure and its awareness of what the oath of office had just done to him. He was not running any more. He was presiding.

His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Yes, Obama set some clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window not for presidential action but for constitutional invitation. The invitation is to the other coequal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order.

You saw this in the flurry of modest but piercing executive orders quietly gutting the near-dictatorial powers seized by Cheney on behalf of the dauphin. You see it in the patient understanding that Guantanamo cannot be closed overnight, although the world-view that gave us Guantanamo has already been abolished. You saw it also last week as the Democratic president spent two long hours with House Republicans seeking consensus - which he did not require to pass the law - on the stimulus package. The Republicans never had that kind of respect from Bush. And they rewarded Obama with unanimous opposition in the vote on the package. But the symbolism was telling.

From the Decider we now have the Presider. If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. And this is not a Democratic or Republican issue, or even a liberal or conservative issue. It is one form of conservatism – authoritarian, bellicose and protective - being replaced by another: consensual, traditional, cautious. It is the conservatism of law replacing the conservatism of action.

It’s fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realise itself in public actions. The system - as the founders once hoped - is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. It took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

SOURCE, THE LEFT WING TIMES

* Have your say

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2009 at 04:55 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Media-Bias • Obama, The One • UK •  
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