Bizarro President --Jane Smiley

[Demeter]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/bizarro-president_b_30829.html


There is a reason America doesn't have a king, and it is that the Founders, whatever their faults, realized that in spite of centuries of effort that had gone into making monarchy work, courts and countries were repeatedly stuck with children, madmen, idiots, profligates, fools, and knaves who happened to be firstborn sons of the reigning monarch. I know that the members of the Bush Administration have never seen a conflict of interest that they didn't want to perpetrate, and that it is very tempting, if you are power mad, to assert, "I want total power, so I am going to say I have it, and you are going to let me have my way, even though every day in every way I show that I don't have the intelligence or good judgment to wield the power I want," but do we really want to go there as a nation? I think we should stick with the Founders.

Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and the other neocons are all cut from the same cloth. They want to run the world, but they don't know enough about the world to actually achieve anything other than damage and chaos. Surely this is the failure of the "CEO President" model and a perfect example of crony capitalism at work. The vote on the detainee bill last week shows that Congress remains in thrall to something that the citizens reject. In the abstract, I would like to know what that is, but mostly I would just like to throw the bums out.