Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution (II)

America's Moonpaper of 17 February 2009

[P]residential detachment from high policy decision making is dangerous in a White House that has so many czars and other senior players (the West Wing staff is reputed to be more than 130 -- about double the usual number) combined with emissaries and strong-willed Cabinet secretaries. It may well lead to what has been called (regarding another country's government) "the immanent structurelessness to [sic] the running of the state."

Neocomrade A. Blankley , a native of Airstrip One and immigrant to ChristoKorea (the capital of L@@NA), is not a product of the Harvard Victory School. Technically he is a shyster, but Neocomrades Addin’ton, Esq., and Yoo, Esq., and General Gonzales need not fear that little Tony will poach on their legal manors. In practice, he's only a Heritagitarian agitprop artist.

The neocomrade remains cliché-Brit enough to pretend to superior erudition even when he does not have it: that "immanent structurelessness" piffle comes from no source more impressive than here . ’Tis no grand surpise that His Sirship was talking about Chancellor Hitler's methods of government, concerning which it is a cliché not confined to Brits.

Nobody alive has had time enough to figure out what BHO's considered views on immanence and transcendence and structurality may be, so let us assume that Tony mostly just wants to be rude about his political enemies without takin’ responsibility for his rudeness by makin’ a stand-alone argumentum ad Hitlerum of his very own. Not just a brat but a sneak is little Tony.

Still, he would not have swiped that particular swipe if he admired the kaiserliche-und- königliche Schlamperei. One must assume that Tony wishes poor old laid-back Adolf had been rather a cliché-Prussian, more like Frederick the Great. Making a few judicious allowances for time and place, King Frederick II (d. 1786) was about as close as Old Europe can show to Neocomrade R. B. Cheney. Oddly enough, Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250) was rather Blankleyesque as well. Thee can take thee's pick, Mr. Bones, since both Freds were thoroughly in favour of the minimum or CliffsNotes version of the Unitary Executive™, i.e., "My way or the highway!" (MWOTH! is allegedly one of the management secrets of the Rev. Moon

as well, though I don’t suppose little Tony was ever actually admitted to the Cult of Himself.)

With his heart on Airstrip One and his mind in the Holy Roman Empire (or the Third Reich), little Tony's opinions about the Homelandic system of government cannot be worth much. He does, though, in passin’ acknowledge the existence of Mr. Madison’s Legislative Branch, sayin’:

Thus, as [the President] has identified the stimulus as essential to the recovery process, his willingness to let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid design a bill that, even now that it's passed, Mr. Obama has continued to criticize as needing improvement (on bank executive compensation) leaves one puzzled as to why he didn't use his currently vast political clout with his own party allies to shape a bill more to his liking.

That passage would require some serious glossing if James Madison were expected to grok it: Neocomrade A. Blankley clearly supposes the Parteigemeinschaft of Obama and Pelosi and Reid trumps the formal arrangements laid down by the Gang of ’87.

He further appears to be ignorant of the authentic or Cook County meaning of the technical term ‘clout’: it refers to the extraction (or originally, the extractor) of goodies for constituents from City Hall, not having the whip hand over the rest of one’s own crew. But that error may not be little Tony's fault, since the social scientisers have apparently got their paws on it.

In any case, and no matter whence he dredges up his ideas of colonial self-government and his unattributed swipes, little Tony from Airstrip One plainly thinks the White House ought to be run along Cheneyoid lines, which is all that I am collecting him as an example of.