This might be more of an MPSIMS than Great Debate, but I’m putting it in here anyway, because I can see this getting heated.
I’ve noticed recently a kind of histeria that some people seem to have when talking about the President and current administration. They seem to be convinced that the administration is not just wrong, but evil, and that if the administration had their way, the President would become dictator for life and take away all our rights. Am I the only one to notice these attitudes, and more to the point, am I the only one to be worried about them?
It seems like, for our political system to work, each side needs to give their opponents the benefit of the doubt, and assume they’re sincere…misguided in their policies and ideology, but sincere. The attitudes I’ve outlined above don’t seem to lead to that sort of honest policy debate. They’re evangelical in nature…defeating President Bush in November becomes not only the goal to strive for, but a moral neccessity, from which there can be no compromise or no room for debate. And that scares me. Do you think I’m overreacting? That this is no more than the usual partisan mud that gets flung, or is this something to worry about?
I think you are setting up and knocking down a strawman. If you know of someone who said Bush wants to be dictator for life and take away all our rights, by all means give us a quote. I don’t think that’s true, and I also don’t think a lot of people subscribe to that belief.
But as to your other point, yes, I think many in the U.S. feel that the stakes are higher than usual. This is not just the usual partisanship. Few presidents have managed to do as much damage as Bush has done in such a short time. He’s alienated our allies in the world, got us into a quagmire in Iraq, racked up record defecits, eroded our civil liberties, slashed a great deal of environmental protection that took a long time to put into place, gotten extremely questionable sweetheart-deals for his cronies, and continues to lie to the American public. Sorry, but this is WAY beyond simple differences in ideology. The guy is just plain incompetent. This is not “partisan mud”. What we need to “worry about” is whether the voters will wake up from their dream in time to see this man as he truly is.
The same attitude surrounded President Clinton, evinced then by the right. Mr. Clinton apparently embodied some sort of permissive evil that, left unchecked, would destroy the country. While it didn’t reach full strength until his second term – and thus wasn’t manifested as “Let’s defeat Clinton in the election” – it was the underlying motive in funding Paula Jones’ lawsuit, the appointment of Ken Starr, and ultimately the impeachment of the President.
While Mr. Clinton had his faults, I don’t think he was deserving of that kind of hatred.
My point is the phenomenon is not new - indeed, the current hysteria from the left may well be a reaction to the hysteria from the right directed at the last administration. In this case, I’d say the conservatives were the first ones with dirty hands.
The problem is that as much as we’d like to think that having elected governing officials prevents dictatorship from being a possibility, we’ve seen otherwise, and the people running for office whose trajectory leads to dictatorship don’t typically campaign on a platform of “elect me and I’ll centralize all power in my own hands and make myself dictator”. Instead their rhetoric tends to sound more like “elect me and I’ll do something about these infidels & creeps here in our midst whose grimy ways and bad morals explain why everything sucks these days. Tough on crime, I’ll be, law and order, law and order. Traditional values. Patriotism. Righteousness and morality”.
That is not to say that everyone who sounds like that and whose policies appear to value control over liberty is a dictator-wannabe who will oppose every dissenter as Evil Incarnate and try to crush them. Some politicians of this ilk may just be old-fashioned self-important moralists with broomsticks up their butts who would react to a significant dissent from their views with a cold-blooded “fooey, I thought folks would appreciate what I was trying to do”.
With George W, most of us don’t think he has the political wherewithal, either in the traditional legitimate or the machiavellian sense, to impose a dictatorship, although we don’t like the trajectory he’s on one damn bit. Others, more worried, think he’s going to declare martial law and suspend elections or fix the elections or something, having less faith in the sheer numbers and powers of people in America who wouldn’t stand for that.
Me, I figure George is going to be muttering after the first week in November things like “They should have voted for me, I was doing all the things that should be accompliced and real good too, it’s a liberal conspiricacy, and after Kerry raises taxes and makes America wimpy and stuff, you’ll all be sorry”.
You also have to bear in mind that, no matter how things had gone during Bush’s administration, there would be an unusually high level of determination on the Democrats’ part to win the election, and an unusually high level of anger and bitterness, simply because of the “We wuz robbed!” factor. The events of the 2001 election still rankle (and rightly so!). The Democrats and liberals are out, not just for victory, but for revenge. May we win both in full measure!
As for Bush, I don’t credit him with the imagination to aspire to a dictatorship. But there are plenty of neocons in Washington who would be more than ready to back any move he made in that direction, and justify it on national-security grounds.
What Bricker said – back when Clinton was in office, I had a co-worker who would come in to work every few months announcing that any day, any day now, Clinton would be declaring martial law and taking all up the guns.
As someone who finds plenty of fault with both Dubya and Clinton (even though I voted for them both) I agree that it’s an ugly, insidious trend, and appears to get worse with each passing year.
Well I stand corrected. I didn’t realize so many people seriously believed that Bush is going to completely overturn the Constitution. I think he’s tried to put some chinks in it, but I think it’s pretty nuts to think he’s going to make himself dictator for life. However, I still don’t see this is cause for concern that the political process is somehow going to grind to a halt.
Oh, I don’t know that you can fob this off on sour grapes. I don’t think people would feel quite the sense of urgency to vote Bush out, had he not done all the things he’s done.
Although, Bricker, I’d have to disagree that the first ‘dirty hands’ were conservative. It’s not clear to me which party started it – I remember the rumors that Nixon had paid the Rand Corporation to do a study on the feasibility of cancelling the 1972 election. And I don’t doubt that it goes back even further, but that’s about as far back as my political memory goes (I was born in 1959).
Have to agree with Bricker and BrainGlutton on this…I think its a backlash from the Clinton presidency, as well as the fucked up 2001 election. I also agree with Bricker that it was the Pubs that first started down this particular slope during the Clintons presidency. Sure, there had been partisan politics and mud slinging before, but it never achieved the frenzy it did until Clinton was president.
I also remember co-workers and assorted nut jobs wringing their hands over the man, as if he were the anti-Christ or something, and predicting all kinds of dire things…most of which were as ridiculous as the current frenzy against Bush.
And none of which in fact happened. I knew we were in for the same shit actually even before Bush was sworn in.
Before the man took office I had democrat friends confidently informing me that Bush would immediately repeal Roe vs Wade, make abortion illegal, completely throw open gun ownership and deregulate it all, and head into Alaska guns blazing and drills out…as well as myriad other dire warnings. Its only gotten more frantic from there, finally surpassing the unbelievable level previously attained by wild Billy boy sometime shorty after the invasion of Iraq.
It is also worth noting that across a wide range of issues, this Administration has shown a penchant for secrecy and for attempting to limit the ability of citizens and even Congress to obtain information and analyze the executive branch’s decision making process. I’m not claiming that this is anywhere near leading to a dictatorship, but it is undermining our democratic process.
And, of course, along with this is the Administration’s lies and deceptions (and what SimonX calls “not lies”…statements that are technically not lies but are formulated in ways that tend to make people believe things that are not in fact true). Again, this undermines our democracy and creates some very 1984-ish discourse in the policy arena
The good news, I suppose, is that this all seems to be that this is finally beginning to catch up with them. The bad news, however, is that we will all pay the consequences.
With Clinton, it seems to me the virol came primarily from talk radio and various conservative media outlets (anyone remember Falwell selling those “Dark Secrets of Bill Clinton” videotapes?).
With Bush, the virol comes primarily from his policies.
The problem is, even if you vote Bush out of office, you’ll still have the right-wing instapundits screeching venom and discord 24/7.
No shortage of “tinfoil hat” moments, especially from the OP. Getting back to the factual side of the discussion, the whole “suspending elections” thing seems to be complicated at least, if not impossible due to checks and balances.
I agree that some conservatives became unhinged over Clinton. He wasn’t a bad President at all - he was a centrist ‘caretaker’ president who left the country somewhat better off than when he took power.
But I’ve got to say, the level of animosity towards Clinton isn’t even CLOSE to the spittle-flinging hatred for Bush that I’m seeing now. Respected posters of this board are claiming that the election will be stolen, that Bush wasn’t to be a dictator, that he’s destroying everyone’s civil rights, that the world is collapsing because of him, that he’s the worst president ever, yada yada yada. Totally over-the-top. Conspiracy theories about Halliburton fly around this board unchallenged. It’s ridiculous.
And the stage is set for it to get even worse. If Bush wins in November, the left is going to go absolutely batshit crazy. If Kerry wins, the right will probably do the same thing. Everyone should just tone it down a few notches. No one is about to be installed as dictator-for-life, and no matter who is elected in November, the Republic will stand.
You’d have a point if these people weren’t bringing cites along with their “tin-foil hat” conspiracies. Unfortunately, Dick Cheney is keeping secret the whys and wherefores of his energy policy meetings, the CEO of Diebold did promise to deliver Ohio’s electorial votes for Bush, unsecured and uncertified electronic voting machines have been used in elections already, the Administration is classifying “enemy combatants” as outside the reach of the Geneva Convention, the Bush family does have extensive ties to the House of Saud, and so on.
It’s one thing to dismiss the Clinton critics as tin-foil hat nutjobs because they couldn’t offer any evidence for their claims; it’s another thing to dismiss the Bush critics as nutjobs when they do.
The Executive has always been secretive in its decision-making processes, and I think that’s a good thing. The Framers of the Constitution held secretive, closed-door meetings, away from the prying eyes of the electorate. The meetings were done in secret to encourage the free discussion of ideas, good or bad, among the delegates. I’m reminded of another executive (Otto Van Bismark) who said something about sausages and laws.
Executives have always appreciated and used this fact. The Bush Admin isn’t any more or less secretive than any prior Admin. For example, Republicans sued Clinton because he refused to disclose the parties with whom he’d met while formulating his national health care plan. Sound familiar?
It’s just that criticism of secretive decision-making processes has been heating up since Watergate, and has accelerated through Reagan and Clinton. And you’re probably more aware of it now because the opposition party is in power.
We may not get free reign to analyze the Executive’s decision-making process, but we do get to analyze its decisions. Who cares what they discussed at their meetings, so long as they arrived at the correct decisions? I think that’s more than enough to protect our democracy.
Wow. I’m surprised that anyone has their blinders on so tight that they could possibly believe this is true.
Do you think that Bush is immune from criticism from talk radio and liberal media outlets? What about Air America, an entire liberal radio network that’s sprung up to criticize Bush? What about Al Franken, Molly Ivens, Thomas Friedman, Anna Quindlen, Bill Press, Helen Thomas, Eric Alterman, Paul Krugman, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Tom Tomorrow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Maureen Dowd, Robert Kuttner, Jim Hightower, Slate, the American Prospect, the New Republic, Michael Moore, etc., etc., etc. Even the mainstream media skews liberal.
And I can’t help but notice that it’s been 3 years since Clinton was voted out of office, and the left-wing instapundits are still screeching venom and discord. Or did they recently declare some sort of armistice and I just hadn’t heard about it?
And surely you don’t think that the vitriol spewed at Clinton had no basis in his policies. What about the health care fiasco? The Brady Bill? Assault weapons bans? Affirmative action? 11th hour pardons? The Branch-Davidian raid? Numerous scandals, including Travelgate and Whitewater and placing fundraising phone calls from federal buildings? The supposed Wag-the-Dog missile launches? Kosovo? Somalia? The Kyoto Treaty? Public lands grazing policy? Depletion of the national oil reserves to lower gas prices? The policy of Chinese engagement? $200 haircuts on Air Force One that held up air traffic at LAX for hours? Joycelyn Elders? Opening relations with Vietnam? Don’t ask, don’t tell? The use of executive orders to bypass the legislature in formulating law? (“Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool,” says former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, dismissing objections of critics who despise the process as unconstitutional lawmaking, no matter which president uses it.)
[Note: I agreed with Clinton on many of these policies, but to suggest that they were not controversial or didn’t form the basis of criticism is just silly.]
On preview, I should have just said, “blowero, please read what Revtim said about noticing irrational hatred.”
Nitpick here, and I agree with most of the sentiments in this thread, but, um, that’s probably because Halliburton really is getting beefy government contracts? If, for instance, Halliburton wasn’t getting gov’t contracts, there would probably be more challenges for those conspiracy theories.
I don’t necessarily believe all of them as conspiracy theories, but there is some substance to them. On the flip side of the coin, who do people think had and has beefy contracts in Serbia? Halliburton. So the correlation may not mean causation.
On the other hand, the right wing radical theories on Clinton were absolutely insane. Going back and reading some of the drivel posted around the Internet around '98, and these people are absolute nutcases. Compared to the Clinton theories, the Bush theories are downright true.
I often say that I hated Clinton, but Bush redefined the word “hate” for me.
I don’t think Bush wants to become a dictator, though. As I’ve said previously, he is too simple-minded. He’s like a good dog. No way Bush would overthrow American democracy. He believes in it too much.
The people who scare the hell out of me are the ones pulling his strings. PNAC makes cold shivers run down my spine. THEY are where the source of the conspiracy theories comes from, not Bush himself. Bush is just a patsy. PNAC is what people are afraid of - not so much Bush declaring himself dictator, as PNAC subverting the government and manipulating the population to serve their purposes.