Getting out from under what words mean is occasionally useful for all pols.
No doubt OnePercenter pols need to have recourse to it more than most, bein' forever tempted to talk in a way that does not put off the Big Party's dupes and yet at the same time retains a little connection with what the dupers are really up to. The other day, Prof. Krugman reiterated his amazement at how Boy and Party lied about their economic policies in 2000. That show certainly was pretty amazing, but the dupers were not exactly lyin' -- obviously not by their own flexible and weekly standards, and not even by the standard that Mr. Bones and I bring to bear upon public-sector twistifiers.
Krugman does not think well historically and politically, I fear, and much of his hostile amazement must be discounted. Grant's Old Party has almost always "lied" after that particular fashion. After fourteen decades of consistent economic spin, there is really no excuse for anybody being unaware of it, and even mustering up proper indignation becomes rather a bore at last. In any case, we donkeys are obviously responsible for the perpetual sub-Orwellism of the OnePercenters. It was we who defined what it means to be a political party in the USA.
One shudders to think what would have become of Uncle Sam if the dupers had been able to define the phrase "political party"! Fortunately we were here first -- that is to say, Ms. America was democratic before it was attempted to make her a plutocrat and a Big Manageress -- and so the framework is ours. On rare occasions the Grant faction tries to break out of the cage that it finds itself in, treatin' us all to impersonations of the Essex Junto or Gen. Hamilton on the nature of the Great Beast. Outbursts of dotty and obsolete neo-Federalism are not only harmless, they are rather fun. They have yet to do the Grantites any good, and until the hired hands come up with some undetectable and infallible scheme for electronic vote fraud, it will not do them any good. Meanwhile the OnePercenters can only win most elections by actually gettin' more votes than America's party can muster, and for that purpose their perpetual sub-Orwellism cannot be dispensed with.
The most GOP-imperilled word of the English language is of course "freedom," yet the dupers do not attempt to subvert it directly, they only tacitly restrict it. The dupers take for granted among themselves that the only True Freedom is the freedom to bigmanage, and given the nature of the F-word, no rhetorician can seriously deny that freedom to bigmanage is a subspecies of freedom simpliciter. Anything and everything can be dressed up as freedom from its own opposite and all its contraries without there being any actual abuse of language. That unrestricted bigmanagement systematically infringes the freedom -- in a slightly different sense -- of bigmanagees is obvious to us jackasses, but that is a matter of fact, not terminology. OnePercenterdom does not have to lie, or "get out from under the meaning of" its favorite word, it needs only to keep its mouth shut about the esoteric interpretation thereof. Since March of 1869, the Grantites have pursued that plan steadily and achieved quite a lot of success.
Everybody knows all that -- or at least she and Paul Krugman should know it by now -- as regards the economic royalists when they are actin' economically. Because the crucial ploy is negative, only to keep silent about their private-sectorian and LeoStraussian™ secret meanin's, the cherished freedom to bigmanage has rarely come into explicit conflict with Rulalaw. Rather the contrary, if anything. Back when Grantite extremists were even more firmly in the saddle than they have been since 2001, "freedom to bigmanage" was interpreted into the Fedguv Constitution for them by their Party's tame Supreme Court justices. That ideal racket did not survive their Party's Dr. Hoover and America's New Deal. Probably they can never resuscitate the pseudoconstitutional racket altogether, although their tame neo-justices certainly are takin' a valiant stab at a restoration.
Under less than ideal judiciary conditions for OnePercenterdom such as presently obtain, there is undoubtedly a latent clash between Rulalaw and the right/freedom to bigmanage. For example, "socialized medicine," though hardly a real and present danger, cannot be ruled out altogether. Congress could enserf all the Party's medical bigmanagers and wannabe bigmanagers without much fear that the present Five of Nine would strike such legislation down as obviously contrary to Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics and therefore to the 1787 compact (as amended).
The really serious clashin' occurs outside Lord Mammon's sphere, however. Rulalaw becomes a nuisance to Little Brother and other Big Party fans at the moment mainly in conjunction with their practical Kiddie Krusade and their dogmas of Preëmptive Retaliation. If LB cannot either bigmanage all aggression and occupation policy himself or else delegate the bigmanagement of it to hired hands like Lute and Crocker and Petraeus, why, what's to become of us all? Why not just have Uncle Sam humbly ask to join M. Bin Ládin's caliphate straightaway?
Now the Venerable Framers saw this clash coming, as they naturally did not foresee democracy in America, let alone capitalism and the Party of plutocracy. George XLIII is rather similar to George III in respects that everybody at Philadelphia recognized and worried about, including even Col. Hamilton, as he then was. Accordingly, there is a good deal of foundational Rulalaw for Kiddie Krusaders to clash with or, if possible, to detour around. [1]
Bein' (only) sub-Orwellians, they prefer detourin' around, and yesterday Ms. Lithwick of Slate described how they do it here in the holy Homeland:
| Padilla was an American citizen, arrested without weapons in his street clothes at a Chicago airport in 2002. His case reveals in starkest relief the administration's bounce-around strategy. Padilla was shuttled out of the criminal justice system and into military detention on the eve of a court hearing to determine whether his continued detention was lawful. He was tossed back into the criminal justice system only when an airing of his claims at the Supreme Court became imminent. These moves were all part of a government effort to dodge judicial oversight. But just to be crystal clear: when Padilla was not in the criminal justice system, he was hardly treated as a prisoner of war. And when he was not in military detention, he was not being treated as a criminal defendant. The administration's trick throughout Padilla's five-year ordeal was to appear to comply with one of two legal regimes without actually utilizing either. |
Quite by coincidence, Mr. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post this morning describes the Big Managers' methods of assertin' their supralegality out in the boondocks of the former Iraq:
| Martins, the chief judge advocate for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that while Iraq is holding detainees under its domestic law, the United States holds them under "the law of armed conflict" standards set by the Geneva Conventions. That means that U.S. military forces have determined "that a detainee represents an imperative threat to the security and stability of Iraq." |
Neocomrade Colonel M. Martins holds, or cynically recommends, a rather ingenious and Party-friendly notion of the Geneva Conventions, which in fact date from a period before "imperative threats to security and stability" were widely thought to have much to do with the international law of war, apart from special circumstances. Dr. Gen. Petraeus of West Point and Princeton, with his neo-MacNamaran counterinsurgency, may turn tactics and operations and strategy upside down, yet international Rulalaw he can scarcely pretend to have a right to redecorate to suit himself and Boy and Party.
That ancillary cleverness, though, is not the main point, but rather how both these bigmanagerial detours around Rulalaw share a common modus operandi. By dividin' they conquer! In both cases, everythin' the perps really want to perpetrate will most likely turn out to have somehow dropped through the cracks, either the crack between the UCMJ and other domestic law, or the crack between the Green Zone collaborationist pols' legislation and the Spirit of Geneva.
That scam really is pretty spiffy, although one cannot praise it with any firm assurance that the militant Grantites are doin' it on purpose and systematically. It exactly suits their Party's case, however, so perhaps they deserve the benefit of a doubt. Trapped as they are in the cage that Gen. Jackson and Mr. Van Buren originally built for their Whig predecessors even before there existed any Whig predecessors, the Big Managers of 2007 cannot frankly avow their right/freedom to bigmanagement at all, let alone expect the ignorant mob of Televisionland and the electorate to agree that that sacred right/freedom trumps Rulalaw. Juridical or jurisdictional divide-and-rule beautifully matches their plight, the aggression faction can pretend to be obeyin' two different systems of Rulalaw to amuse the dupes and boobs, yet still do pretty much as they please.
This is the very yuckiest kind of political spinach, of course, Mr. Bones, but you really do gotta admit that it is ben trovato, sir!
____
[1] Only the jihád careerists attack this difficulty head on, and even they do not explicitly blaspheme against Mr. Madison and Company. Nevertheless, anti-Islamophalangitarianism only makes sense if one assumes that the America of 1787 subscribed to a radically defective view of human nature. Had the Venerable Framers been aware of the existence of such cockroaches in human form as the Big Management Party now kiddy-krusades against, naturally they would have been compelled to abandon their silly Panglossian Enlightenment at once, and consequently the Fedguv Constitution would be quite different and much less of an obstacle to supralegality.
No comments:
Post a Comment