The Last of the Worst
Atlanta, GA
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
– HL Mencken
Having spent the last few days smashing idols, toppling icons, and besmirching cherished heroes, today we round out our Presidents’ Day review of low conduct in high office. This final chapter may seem less sacrilegious than the perceived heresies of some of the earlier sketches.
This morning, we excommunicate a few blatant blasphemers. None of these heathens bothered even to genuflect at their constitutional catechism. They’d usually attend the requisite ceremonies on the designated days. Occasionally, they might’ve bowed their head, waved rhetorical incense toward the church fathers, and chanted the prescribed prayers.
But otherwise, even in the same temple on the same day, they’d openly haggle with the money changers and consort with the harlots. In a way, our current crooks are more honest than their more dignified predecessors, in that they lack the genteel hypocrisy that made it so difficult for their ancestors to preach what they practiced.
In fairness to our modern malefactors, recent presidents tend to be more the needle than the record. Most of the tunes the government plays now comes from unseen composers within the dark grooves of the Deep State. Presidents are not the rower, they’re the oar…tho’ it can be argued that one of the guys we will discuss today was an errant outboard motor that was attached to the wrong end of the boat.
Chief executives are now subsumed in the imperial apparatus the way a fish is surrounded by the ocean, or the birds by the air. On some level, they have no choice (and, at this point, no other instinct) but to swim with the tide, or sail on the breeze. But that’s not to let them off the hook, or out of our sights.
Except for public consumption, presidents nowadays are expected not to set agendas, but to follow them. And, no matter who is elected, those agendas come not from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, but from conference rooms and corner offices in Northern Virginia, southern Manhattan, and Silicon Valley.
Even so, I in some ways skate into this essay with more trepidation than I did those of the last several days. The ice is thin enough in the past. In the present, where emotions remain high, it’s easier to fall thru.
Besides, what do I know about any of this? No more than anyone else, and probably much less. As has been amply demonstrated, I’m just another nitwit with an iPhone. Once more, I’m prepared to prove it.
George W Bush. The commentator Michael Malice describes conservatives as “progressives going the speed limit.” But even that is too generous an assessment. Since the turn of the century (and really starting with Reagan), putative political “conservatives“ have been toying with the sound barrier.
George W Bush blasted thru it.
The tentacles of the Bush family extend deep into the crevices and crannies of the State apparatus. As presidents, senators, spooks, and ambassadors, their New England pedigree reputedly goes back to Adamses, with whom they are remotely related.
Their fingerprints are all over the twentieth century, often on wiretaps, weapons, and bugs. The elder Bush was responsible for much of those cloak and dagger shenanigans. Poppy deserved to be on this list, and was when I initially compiled it.
But his son displaced him, and its easy to see why. To borrow a phrase from the second President Bush, “it’s not rocket surgery.” The child committed all the sins of the father, added to them a slew of his own, and in twice the time did ten times the damage.
Twice George W Bush stood on the west front of the Capitol, raised his right hand…and lied. Had he not been there on January 20, I’m not sure anything he did during his two terms would’ve been constitutional.
It didn’t take long for the travesties to start. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act came off the shelf. It’s almost as if this monstrosity had already been written, and that its authors had patiently awaited their moment. And now they had it.
By the following month, Bush signed this all-out assault on the Fourth Amendment. Since that time, the US government has tracked our communication, accessed our assets, monitored our movements, and felt up grandmas and girl scouts before they can get on a plane. Signing and executing this law are both impeachable offenses. But the overwhelming response from a rugged American public, and their representatives in Congress, has been a collective yawn. After all – can’t be too safe!
Then came the military. American history offers few abominations to rival the Iraq War. Like the Patriot Act, the invasion had advocates who had waited years to roll the tanks and drop the bombs. The 9/11 attacks were an implicit justification, notwithstanding that Iraq had nothing to do with them. The propaganda and the lies came fast and furious.
The administration sent its lackeys on TV to claim the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction, the “smoking gun” that would come in the form of a “mushroom cloud.” It was preposterous, but effective. Over Baghdad, the US military soon lit up the skies. On the ground, Iraqi civilians ran for cover and mourned their dead. The awe passed quick. The shock stuck around.
Over the next decade and a half, trillions of US dollars and a million dead Iraqis were soon sacrificed to this moral enormity. Surreptitious torture dens opened shop…under a joint venture between the US Army and the CIA…at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Persia, another slow motion disaster unfolded in Afghanistan. That war, the longest in American history, persists to this day. We still await a Congressional declaration authorizing either conflict. But in the meantime, George W Bush left us an open-ended war, against an undefined enemy, and with no clear objective. Like a skin rash, it has spread across the Middle East.
Back in “the Homeland”, Dubya put his own twist on the expansion of executive power by his abuse of the “signing statement”, which he used at twice the combined frequency of all previous presidents. These statements are basically a back-handed way of issuing a line-item veto. The Court had declared those to be unconstitutional. So, as Truman did with expiring war programs, Bush simply called them something else and did them anyway.
Under this administration, rampant spending and fake funds sapped the economy like a ten pound flea on a five pound dog. The expansion of Medicare, further intrusion into the housing market, deeper incursions into “Education”, and continued price-fixing by the Fed shifted into high gear the journey to bankruptcy, default, and societal decay.
During the last year of Bush’s terms, the jig appeared to be up. Financial institutions were failing, markets were collapsing, and For Sale signs rusted on millions of lawns, from Miami to Mesa. But rather than clear the floor and collect the drinks, the administration opened the taps and brought in a new band! No matter the cost, they would do what they could to keep the party going…to sustain the binge and forestall the hangover.
Misunderstanding the “lessons of the Depression”, the Fed used counterfeit cash to buy anything that wasn’t nailed down. Interest rates vanished, and took price signals with them, in the all-out effort to re-inflate the bubble the Fed had originally blown up.
Over $700B were poured into Wall Street institutions, with the charges placed on Main Street’s tab. It was an immoral, uneconomic, and unconstitutional outrage. Yet it kept the sinking vessel afloat until GWB could disembark the ship of state.
But the damage was done, and the script was written. Fake money, calamitous wars, indefensible bailouts, and corporate cronyism were now part of the new template to provide real support to the connected elite, and phony “security” to the hapless masses. This screenplay would soon be rehashed, and expanded upon, by…
Barack Obama. We are now to the point where events are almost too recent to be remembered. Or perhaps I blocked them out.
Or maybe I’m just old. Short-term memory isn’t what it used to be. I can tell you that Louis XV played around with Madame de Pompadour, but keep forgetting the name of the porn star Donald Trump paid off.
But as I began recalling the constitutional affronts of our contemporary executives, each memory triggered the next…one by one…like a daisy chain leading to an IED. The more of them that came to mind, the more I felt the need to stand back, for fear of blowing up.
As we’ve patrolled the troubled waters of our worst leaders, we’ve learned or reinforced a few lessons. One of them is that pomposity often varies inversely with competence. In different ways and using opposing styles, the last two members of this notorious club are clear validations of that useful observation.
Barack Obama subscribed to the putrid opinion of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon that nothing is illegal when the president does it. He affirmed that belief by continuing to breach constitutional constraints in his execution of the “war on terror”. He did so at home too.
I can’t imagine anyone in the Obama Administration…unless maybe off the record, deep into the night, and after a few shots of whiskey…denying that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional. Our confessor almost certainly wouldn’t care, and would think Obamacare should be enacted anyway. But he can’t possibly be blind to such a blatant violation of the Tenth Amendment.
Once the ACA became law, Obama compounded the mischief. After the bill passed so Congress could find out what was in it, the Administration…to help preserve Democrat seats…unconstitutionally delayed implementation till after the following election. If the ACA was constitutional (as Obama obviously asserted), then he couldn’t legally resist executing it. If it wasn’t, then he again violated his oath by vetoing a later Congressional attempt to repeal it.
As with Roosevelt and Truman before him, and Trump afterward, Obama unconstitutionally crafted and began implementing immigration law. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was created by an executive branch memorandum. It was not a law passed by Congress.
Not to say Congress isn’t constitutionally prohibited from passing most of the bills on which they vote. Anything infringing on gun ownership would be an example. So Obama again used an executive-order end-around to mandate criminal background checks and a ban on “assault rifles”.
This is an obvious abuse of presidential power and a clear violation of the Second Amendment. But even if that amendment were repealed, the Ninth Amendment also protects the right to bear arms. Regardless the ostensible merits of the intended result, Obama’s executive orders were unambiguous violations of his presidential oath.
Barack Obama adhered to the theory, which goes back to Lincoln, that a president can act unilaterally to wage war. Why wouldn’t he? He acted unilaterally in almost everything else he did. On this obviously absurd principle, he rationalized his decision to bomb Libya.
In Yemen, Barack Obama’s unilateral action put the US government behind a war that can be categorized only as a genocide. Had he been president of Serbia rather than president of the United States, this engagement alone would’ve had him hauled to a war crimes court in the Hague.
Under the endlessly convenient guise of fighting “terrorism”, the Nobel Peace Prize winner maintained a “Kill List”, which included American citizens. He also authorized drone strikes that murdered innocents across Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Back home, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which suspended habeas corpus…in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, but direct contravention of the Bill of Rights.
It’s no wonder that after the first sixteen years of the century, Americans would clamor for someone…anyone!… outside the conventional basket of candidates they are consistently offered. Unfortunately, the best they came up with was…
Donald Trump. At long last, we’ve found one we’re all supposed to hate! And, to be fair, we should.
Historians usually like to let time pass, to let boiling passions simmer, before passing judgement on people or events of recent vintage. Not so with Donald Trump. Historians, commentators, journalists, and pundits proclaimed him a failure almost as soon as he came down the escalator.
They may have been hasty, but they weren’t wrong. Yet their reasons often were. In many ways, Trump…like Nixon…was hated less for his vices than for his virtues. Unfortunately, he abounded in the former, and had almost none of the latter.
He was a crude, bombastic, narcissistic imbecile. He had no systematic philosophy and no guiding principle, aside from himself. He seems rarely to have read…and never from a book. He shot from the hip, spoke off the cuff, and much of what he said was moronic. It’s almost not even worth raising constitutional scruples or, for that matter, scruples of any kind when discussing Donald Trump. Because he didn’t have any, and didn’t care.
Stormy Daniels! There…I knew it would come to me.
Where were we? Oh, yeah…
Trump periodically put his ignorance and indifference to good use by ridiculing the arrogant establishment that presumes to rule over us. That drove the respectable people crazy. His boorish behavior brought the presidency down a peg, and we can be grateful for that.
It’d be one thing if he flaunted his ignorance the way Thomas Jefferson wore house slippers. If it was for effect or to make a point…about, say, republicanism, simplicity, or humility…then that’d be fine. But, unfortunately, Trump’s ignorance was genuine. He flaunted it not to make a case, but because it’s all he had. Thomas Jefferson might wear a casual robe around the White House, but he still knew how to dress appropriately in public.
With regard to policy, Donald Trump was virtually indistinguishable from his modern predecessors. In many ways, he governed like an ’80s Democrat. In the first decade of this century, and on other occasions, he actually was a Democrat. He became a Republican in 2011, no doubt for opportunistic reasons…which is why he does anything.
Despite his loud mouth and big talk, he never really changed anything about the manner or extent of government operations. Trends in motion stayed in motion. If anything, they accelerated. The Constitution continued to roll thru the shredder. The swamp grew deeper, the debt grew larger, and the wars continued.
By vetoing a bill that would have withdrawn US support for the atrocities in Yemen, Donald Trump should join Barack Obama and George Bush in the dock of a war crimes tribunal. He launched indefensible air strikes on Syria, which (tellingly) was one of the few things that earned him press approval.
He undid two of the few good things Obama did, by ripping up a nuclear deal with Iran and reinstating restrictions on Cuba. In his last year, he precipitated an unprecedented calamity of oppression and destruction by declaring a “state of emergency” and precipitating a panic to repel a molecule.
Managing a virus is not a president’s job, so Trump wisely resisted calls to unconstitutionally impose draconian restrictions in every state. But he was so inconsistent and incoherent in his communication that the message of individual freedom and personal responsibility was kept at a distance, or muffled under a mask of confusion.
The government response to the virus crippled commerce, and launched previously astronomical spending to inconceivable heights. Donald Trump added trillions more to the debt in one term than Barack Obama did in two. Many of his loudest critics ignored or applauded these outrages, or said that the president didn’t go far enough! In actuality, he didn’t know where he was going.
The Donald had no philosophy, or systematic way of thinking. He could plot, but he couldn’t plan. He was a marketer – of himself. And he was good at it. This was a performance, like professional wrestling, of which he was a fan.
The only political office he ever sought was President of the United States. And he won…the first time he tried, against a formidable establishment that did everything they could to defeat him. As he’d be the first to tell you, it was a great success. After all, he was the most acquitted president in history!
Thirty years ago, people disparaged Pat Buchanan for acknowledging a culture war. If anything, he understated the case. The United States have been pulling apart for years, and the deterioration seems to continue with each passing month. Like jaundiced skin or a bloody stool, Donald Trump was a bad ailment that was symptomatic of a more malignant disease.
It’s good that he was removed, but the tumor is still there.
JD