StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-takes-us-to-war/2011/06/23/AGwFS4hH_story.html

I’m just catching up on my regular reading of the political columns and here is another gem of Conservative thought from Mr. Charles Krauthammer, thoroughly scolding President Obama for his bad behavior regarding The War Powers Resolution. I read this yesterday and decided to let it percolate a bit, before rereading it and then attempting to comment.

Being Commander in Chief is a rather heady business leading to a very well defined hubris and Mr. Obama is not averse to that temptation, in fact, he is right in line with his predecessor and his intellectual theorist John Yoo and his opportunistic positing of the ‘Unitary Executive’. The Right is in a dither, here, exemplified by Mr. Krauthammer about a serious constitutional issue, yet they hardly mentioned it when their party held the Presidency and he committed the same offence more than once. That is just stating the glaringly obvious, but when used as part of a cumulative indictment of the Constitutional Usurper Obama, the Socialist Obama and his various politically exploitable incarnations, it could have the crudest kind of political resonance; for crude political resonances is what the Republican Party has been about since the turn of the century. Should we attribute this very reasonably sounding column by Mr. Krauthammer, although larded with his usual attempts at telling sarcasm, which simply fall flat, to a victory of reason over political passion? The issue seems quite simply to be that some impediments in the communications between the Executive and Legislative branches of the government exist as a matter of practice and even of policy, related in part to the very concept of Commander in Chief: a military designation that reeks of authoritarianism, and does not express any tolerance for the republican practice of power sharing and divided responsibility.  Not even to speak of the ‘Imperial Presidency’ as an evolving problem, exacerbated by the very concept of the ‘Unitary Executive’, as political rationalization for tyranny, for authoritarian rule within the frame of a politically superseded Constitutionalism.        

Political Observer

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/26/niall-ferguson-the-real-costs-of-isolationism.html

Here is America’s favorite import next to Rupert Murdoch and Ahmad Chalabi, Niall Ferguson. He has something important to tell us about ‘The American Empire’ and how we really can’t afford to give up the burdens of empire, just because it’s bankrupting our treasury and demoralizing our national life, after the failure of the Free Market Experiment in 2008. It’s only costing us 4.7% of GDP for the entire ‘Defense’ Budget neatly contrasted with 10.3 % of GDP for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Mr. Ferguson never fails to engage statistical power when the defense of ideology demands it. Mr. Ferguson is the ardent defender of America as the successor of the British Empire with all the attendant baggage, like endless war on populations that are resistant to the benevolent guiding hand of their imperial masters.  Mr. Ferguson enjoys being a well placed academic, an Expert, in the parlance of the triumphant Technocratic Mythology, with no real experience of the costs of war, which insures that he can romanticize about that singular imperial pastime, with a kind of mindless joy, as he moves the pieces on the board, in his well insulated study.

Publius  

   

 

Hi, it’s me Myra,
Most of you know me as the inquiring girl reporter for HeddaAndLouellaAreDead.com but today I would like to step out of that role and comment on a recent article by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, at The Daily Caller, titled Obama is flouting the War Powers Resolution. I can say, that I can only really look askance at Mr. Yoo and his confederate writing an opinion piece, on the legal ramifications of President Obama’s act of Constitutional usurpation, as laughable, if it weren’t so obviously self-serving and riddled with self-righteous bad faith. But, then, consider the source, as Rusty always says. Please be aware that I do not support Obama’s position. Mr. Yoo and Delahunty have very dirty hands, Politically and Constitutionally speaking.  So I’m taking this hypocritical broadside from two Bush Restoration legal hacks as part of Campaign 2012. While recalling that the virulent infection of Authoritarianism that now afflicts the Republic is the handy work of these two advocates of legal thuggery. Is it then a surprise that Obama would abuse his Constitutional Mandate to wage war, given the ‘permissive’ environment that Mr. Yoo and Delahunty created on the gossamer notion of ‘the unitary executive’?

Truly yours,

Myra B.