Monday, January 23, 2006
Cult of the Unitary Executive
Excerpt: Alexander Kendrick, The Wound Within; America in the Vietnam Years 1945-1974 pages 409-410 (Little, Brown and Co. 1974)
"Nixonland is a land of slander and scare, of lay innuendo, of a poison pen and the anonymous telephone call, and hustling, pushing, and shoving - the land of smash and grab and anything to win." ~ Adlai E. Stevenson, 1952
"Bu$hCountry is a land of slander and scare, of lay innuendo, of a poison pen and the anonymous telephone call, and hustling, pushing, and shoving - the land of smash and grab and anything to win." ~ Sound Familiar?, 2006
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Constitutional interpretation aside - and the original intention was certainly not the installation of a President-king - the remedies for unaccountable and unshared power, as exposed by Vietnam and Watergate, would seem self-evident. They suggest constraint through statutory limitations on surveillance and secrecy, more congressional overseership of quasi-independent agencies, and greater public answerability by Executive personnel. [...]
[...]
[...] The very fact that Watergate could be brought to book, it was said, demonstrated that despite its weaknesses the "System" had "worked." But the escape from what might have happened, and what Americans not very long ago believed "can't happen here," had been a narrow one. The men who "almost stole America" had done so without excessive hindrance. A few judges, a few undaunted reporters and editors, some conscientious civil servants, a minority of congressmen, a handful of private citizens like those of Common Cause and Nader's Raiders, were the geese on Capitoline Hill who had awakened the garrison.
What some, more radical interpreters saw as a putsch, a conspiratorial attempt to take total control of a government - with secret police methods, illegal use of governmental agencies, extortion of funds, invocation of national security, defiance of legislature and courts, and congenial falsehood - had failed also because of the Nixon administration's own incompetence, pettiness and hollowness. But in this view the formula for American fascism had been devised; it could happen here.
"Nixonland is a land of slander and scare, of lay innuendo, of a poison pen and the anonymous telephone call, and hustling, pushing, and shoving - the land of smash and grab and anything to win." ~ Adlai E. Stevenson, 1952
"Bu$hCountry is a land of slander and scare, of lay innuendo, of a poison pen and the anonymous telephone call, and hustling, pushing, and shoving - the land of smash and grab and anything to win." ~ Sound Familiar?, 2006
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