OxBlog

# Posted 12:31 PM by Taylor Owen

DECIMATING, MOCKING AND SKEWERING: Haven't read Belgravia in a while, but dug in on a flight this morning. Aside from all but endorsing Obama on foreign policy grounds, he is really quite good and calling out bullshit.

He decimates Bush's "demagogic tactics" of listing specific attacks supposedly stopped through torture.

He gives folly to the hypocrisy of presidentialists who at once call for literal interpretations of the constitution while arguing for greater executive power in war, ignoring Madison, who said:

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. ... War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement".

And, citing Anthoy Lewis:

There is a profound oddity in the position of the presidentialists like Yoo, Cheney and Addington. Legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent. But if there is anything clear about the intentions of the framers, it is that they did not intend to create an executive with more prerogative power than George III had. Not even in time of war.

But, it's his skewering of this ridiculous excerpt of Gerson's, that really go me chuckling on my early morning flight:

The most complicated question is why, as a rather serious-minded conservative, I am often found in bohemian coffeehouses, comfortable among the revolutionaries. Maybe it is because politics doesn't always predict lifestyle. Maybe because there is a bohemian impulse inside every writer, searching for a little quiet rebellion. Maybe I just like good soy lattes. Whatever the reason, and whatever the T-shirts say, I'll be back.

As he apply puts, you "can't help being staggered by the tawdry mediocrity of it all." Indeed.

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Comments:

History is not kind to the "war legislationist" school of thought in the USA.

Congress had little influence in
the ultimate strategy or tactics in the Civil War, SA War, WWI, WWII, Korea, and even VN, Kuwait/Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

As a matter of fact in the successful campaigns, Presidents were not running day to day operations.

Grant, Roosevelt, Pershing, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Ridgeway, Powell/Schwartzkopf, and Franks were given a goal by the Executive Branch and, planned the campaign and successfully executed it.

When MacArthur overstepped in Korea, it wasn't the legislature that stopped him; Truman relieved him without consulting Congress.

It was the "conservatives" of the day that railed against that decision. Nonetheless, it was right.

# posted by

vnjagvet : 1:51 AM

Aside from all but endorsing Obama on foreign policy grounds

I knew there was a reason I stopped reading The Belgravia Dispatch. Thanks for reminding me.

# posted by

tim maguire : 3:14 PM