by DetainThis
November 12th, 2008
AP Prepares the Chalice As MSM Usher the Next Despot to the Altar
In a constitutional republic where supreme law exists to limit the government, a president that acts like an emperor is viewed as a tyrant.
In a democratic oligarchy where the largest and most influential news media are trumpets for the corporate state, authoritarians are elevated to hero status while the tyranny of executive fiat is portrayed as lawful, harmless, and noble. The Associated Press committed this intellectual atrocity upon billions in the body of two November 9 “news reports” focusing on the transition between the George Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
In the morning release, ”Like Lincoln and FDR, Obama faces nation in crisis,” D.C. talking points fall like rain as AP lauds two of the worst tyrants in the history of the U.S. Presidency, while in the evening release, ”Obama to use executive orders for immediate impact,” we’re told more-specifically how Obama will attempt to “fix” the crises. Both reports liken the approach and situational disposition of President-elect Obama to those of famous presidents; which is fine. That’s not the issue here.
The problem is Absolutist Propaganda (a.k.a., AP). Whenever certain (most) news media need to justify acts of economic or political rape (a.k.a., federal policy), they call almost exclusively on proponents of executive tyranny and other statism as expert sources. On rare occasions, for the sake of appearing objective, one source might concede a negative fact or two about the beloved ex-presidents — of course watered down, reasoned away with fantastic conjecture, or passed off as mere blunders at worst — but this time we aren’t afforded even that level of journalistic integrity. Instead, it is suggested that everything FDR and Lincoln said was golden; therefore, every intention was sincere and noble; and thus, every intervention undertaken (perpetrated) was necessary and proper. Absent is any discussion on the constitutionality of FDR’s and Lincoln’s actions; nor is a question leveled against the economic and political systems through which they acted.
The result is yet another fiendish inversion to the unquestionable benefit of the corporate state and the inevitable detriment of its subjects (i.e., you and me) — more specifically, an editorial rubber stamp for any future abuse of presidential power by Obama et al.
FDR and Lincoln Did It; That’s the Gospel; Amen
In ”Like Lincoln and FDR,” the crises are firstly identified through AP’s famous unbiased editorializing:
Obama will inherit not just the economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the ongoing threat of a terrorist attack, a resurgent Russia and nuclear proliferation in hot spots across the globe. [1]
Dana Perino couldn’t have said it better. Of course she might have mentioned “Islamofascists,” but AP has to appear objective and professional. Like any good mill, AP must subtly tell its readers that the U.S. president lawfully assumes innumerable roles. And what better a way to package the fraud (for easy consumption by the readers they are dumbing down, of course), than to sum up the FDR legend with glittering generality and oh-so-original sound bytes.
Knowing his opening moves will be widely scrutinized, Obama tried to roll back expectations on election night. . . . Yet he remained upbeat as did Roosevelt, who took the reins of a nation in the depths of the Depression. FDR used his optimism to lift up the downtrodden and refresh the American spirit. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he said at his inauguration in 1933.
Yes. He then went on to contrive and play on that very thing he warned to be afraid of, while setting new standards for prosperity retardation and dragging the nation into WWII with systematic provocations against Germany and Japan that make Bush’s economic and covert wars on Iraq (pre-invasion) and Iran look like diplomacy.
In his first fireside chat in March 1933, FDR said: “We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. … It was the government’s job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible, and the job is being performed.”
That “job being performed” involved the continuation of Herbert Hoover’s counterproductive programs and the enactment of numerous, new unconstitutional ones; all of which worsened the depression, dragging it on for more than a decade. This must not be discussed honestly in public if our objective journalists and their fellow statists, a.k.a., experts, wish to retain that facade of credibility. The same goes for the legacy of Lincoln.
But especially hideous is when Lincoln-worship is employed toward the image of Barack Obama. Lincoln was a racist who used the issue of African slavery even more fiendishly than Republicans nowadays do with abortion. But don’t tell Obama, no! Not after he’s done this:
Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is trying to patch up national divisions. To ready himself for the job, Obama said Friday he is reading some writings by Lincoln, “who’s always an extraordinary inspiration.”
Like Lincoln, Obama used his first speech as president-elect to try to mend fences - and he did it by quoting Lincoln’s conciliatory first inaugural address . . . “Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity,” Obama said of Lincoln, another lanky lawmaker from Illinois.
That sounds really moving, especially to readers not familiar with the history that is intentionally withheld from textbooks and public “debates.” But what other “extraordinary inspiration” can be found in Lincoln’s first inaugural address?
Well, for starters:
[Lincoln] pledged his everlasting support for Southern slavery by making it explicitly constitutional with the “Corwin Amendment,” that had already passed the U.S. House and Senate.
The reason Lincoln gave for opposing the extension of slavery was, in Lincoln’s own words, that he didn’t want the territories to “become an asylum for slavery and [N-word, plural].” He also said that he didn’t want the white worker to be “elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave [N-word, plural].” It was all economics and politics, in other words, and not humanitarianism or the desire to “pick the low-hanging fruit” by stopping slavery in the territories. [2]
So he “freed” the slaves, huh? And what about that purportedly Lincolnian “self reliance and individual liberty and national unity”? Well, the last one is plausible, insofar as “national unity” means we’re all unified under the same all-encompassing central-governing yoke of oppression.
It’s interesting (and herein helpful) to note that, contrary to Obama’s professed comprehension, most interventionist tendencies of today’s U.S. government are rooted in statist philosophies held by Republicans of Lincoln’s era — themselves being comprised in part by rank and file of the then-dying Whig Party, which subscribed to Alexander Hamilton’s statist philosophies. This means mercantilism, corporatism, protectionism, and basically absolute central economic control, inherently favoring the corporately- and politically-connected of society and punishing Average Jane and Joe. Throw in an “energetic” Executive (Caesar), “implied” constitutional powers, and conscription, and you realize that not much changed, philosophically at least, between Hamilton’s time and FDR’s.
In fact, minus the conscription (which is currently only a “national emergency” or “implied power” away), Lincoln’s America is just a smaller version of the corporate state Obama will be ”inheriting.” Indeed, a liberty-less, unconstitutional, and ill-conceived system through which the federal government owns every individual’s life and property, propagated by Alexander Hamilton and his ideological cohorts, has survived and flourished to this day and has only a secure future with an Obama presidency.
So in that sense, yes: Obama does have much in common with the likes of Lincoln and FDR. But it hardly reflects a high premium on individual liberty and self-reliance. It is a sick joke to liken those values to a philosophy of government where every individual has two choices: a) fall victim to the looting carried out by the central government, or b) live off this violent looting of others.
But what is really sadistic is that in the FDR-Lincoln-Hamilton tradition, the government chooses for you: c) both.
Executive Disorder
In “Obama to use executive orders for immediate impact,” AP continues where the morning story left off, with the tacit approval and encouragement of executive tyranny. A new fistful of statists are trotted into the editorial to tell us how Our Dear Leader will faithfully exercise His Divine Right to pillage us for our own good:
President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.
John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush’s executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.
“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” Podesta said. “I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.” [3]
Notice that throughout the entire report, the legal limitations on the use of executive orders are never brought up. The reader is conditioned to believe that constitutionality doesn’t matter as long as that Divine “[M]andate for change” exists as it certainly did during the apparently infallible terms of FDR and Lincoln and the other tyrants. Wait a minute. Did I say tyrants? I meant heroes.
Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush’s first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn’t be surprising if Obama did the same.
Executive orders “have the power of law and they can cover just about anything,” Tobias said in a telephone interview.
Bush used his executive power to limit federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights who argue that destroying embryos is akin to killing a fetus. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Many moderate Republicans also support the research, giving it the stamp of bipartisanship.
Wedge issues — the ones on which the federal government is not expressly allowed to “take action” — are being considered as targets for Obama’s executive orders. But what action will Obama take on constitutional grounds? AP won’t say.
This helps to keep the focus of taxpayer angst off the central government and its tyrannical systems, and onto fellow private citizens. When the people are fighting each other over wedge issues, the actual source of oppression — the state — is out of site and out of mind; that is, until the state comes to the rescue to save the people from themselves (via executive order, for instance). Meanwhile, generalities — “moderate,” “bipartisanship,” ”compromise,” etc. — are used to mask a nefarious reality: Democrats and Republicans alike favor the same immoral and illegal system; they simply disagree on which minority or majority issue to pretend to care about, while using that system to rape every last one of us.
And no: executive orders do not necessarily “have the power of law,” and can not “cover just about anything.”
A president can not make laws; neither can the Supreme Court. Only the Congress can. The Constitution of the United States of America could not be clearer on this, as Article 1, Section 1, reads: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
And on executive orders, professors Thomas E. Woods and Kevin R.C. Gutzman explain:
An executive order, stated simply, is a directive issued by the president. Presidents may issue executive orders in pursuit of constitutional objectives, exercising powers that the Constitution assigns to them. The president may issue pardons by executive order, for instance. He may likewise use executive orders to implement policies for which Congress has granted him discretionary authority.
At the same time, executive orders can be abused, as when presidents employ them as a way of carrying out objectives for which congressional authorization is required. In October 1942, for example, Franklin Roosevelt capped all salaries in the United States at $25,000 by executive order. Roosevelt’s initiative did not last: by March of the following year Congress had forced its repeal, arguing both that it impeded the war effort and that it was incompatible with American principles. [4]
You will not find salary caps, bailouts, stimulus packages, price controls, foreign aid, abortion funding, stem cell research funding, soft money, an income tax, military occupations on foreign soil, etc., among the powers explicitly granted by the Constitution to any branch of the federal government, much less the supposedly-weakest one.
But this will not impede the mission of the Absolutist Propagandists. Think tanks, Monopoly-State Media, and the U.S. Department of Education will perpetuate the Hamiltonian arrangement of society not only because they are so big and powerful and can therefore get away with, but because they exist on account of it and feed off it. They are the state.
That’s why the dyed-in-the-wool statists — Hamilton, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and now Obama — are fawned over in the typical “narrative.” And, naturally, those presidents who did the best job of defending the Constitution and thus honestly opposing leviathan — Washington, Jefferson, Cleveland, et al. — are either omitted or creatively snarled at.
Statists hate what they disingenuously refer to as “do-nothing” presidents, especially those vetoing often (i.e., properly). For the corporate state, it’s ultimately a matter of self-preservation: every veto represents a subsidy denied or not “redistributed” to some corporate or state entity. The more vetoes exercised by a president, the less favorable his image is likely to be in the theses of corporate- or state-funded ”think tanks” and U.S.D.O.E. “history textbooks.”
The corporate- and state-run MSM, quite naturally therefore, will continue to lie, connive, and invert reality toward the longevity of their self-enriching cashcow, the corporate state.
--MORE--"Detainthis raises some great points re: Roosevelt and Lincoln. What I have come to learn is how the history books celebrated government to the rescue time after time. It's a lie you would never think would come from a history book; however, the painful (for me) was that my "education" was a nothing but a bunch of inculcating lies in the relentless agenda-pushing of the myth-masters and issue-framers.
In fact, that has been one of the most painful aspects of life for me to deal with: that I wasted time and money for a degree that is worthless.
