Democracy more or less intact? Take off the rose colored glasses, Krugman! [View All]

[Leopolds Ghost]

Change in rulers among a self-conscious ruling class, an investor class,
if one exists, for whom different rules and different regulations are
assumed to exist, does not equal change.

"As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside
all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were
“enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/putting-it-together/

More or less intact? It is Bush and Reagan whose world they created
which will remain more or less intact, thanks to the path Obama and
the so-called New Democrats have set out upon.

Bush's policies are vindicated by the fact that both Presidential candidates
essentially accept them and propose no major rollbacks of Bush policy, just
as most Americans believe the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to Russian
fondness for Reagan-style gangster capitalism, so Democrats under Clinton
sounded the clarion call to embrace Reaganomics and end the New Deal, which
Clinton (not Reagan) did. After all, if it won the Cold War, then capitalism
must be a metaphysical force for good, right?

Full excerpt, from Krugman's blog:

I haven’t written about the recent revelations in the DOJ scandal.
But there’s a point I haven’t seen made, which should be noted.

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of
due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”;
it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this,
because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people
we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult
of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact.