Greenwald: **Now** the wingers are hyperventilating over autocracy in the executive?!

[BurtWorm]

Did they **really** notice nothing autocratic about Bushism in the last eight years?!


http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/greenwald/~3/400146072/index.html

I wrote earlier today about the sudden right-wing resistance to vast executive authority that has emerged in opposition to the Paulson plan, but still, this post from Ed Morrissey at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air -- full-fledged advocates of every last expansion of unfettered executive power over the last eight years -- is just so exquisite, so perfectly constructed, so unbearably hilarious, that it really expands the definition of "self-satire" and demanded its own featured space:

The crux of the skepticism over the plan comes from an absurd protocol at the heart of it. It makes Henry Paulson a de facto financial czar, in charge of potentially a trillion dollars in taxpayer money with no accountability whatsoever for his actions. Here's the relevant proviso in the legislation:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

We don't allow this kind of free agency from elected officials, let alone political appointees. Not even in his role of Commander-in-Chief does a President have a mandate that is completely unreviewable. Henry Paulson may or may not be the most brilliant thinker in high finance, but even if he was, why would Americans want to give him literally a carte blanche with the equivalent of one-third of our annual budget? With no review possible?

It's absurd, and at its heart, it's un-American, in the sense that America exists precisely because of our desire to rein in government and make it accountable to the people. We gave up on the monarchy in 1776. We certainly didn't do that to trade in King George for Czar Henry. Only in a panic, in which Congressional leadership abdicates its role to keep executive power in check, would any American Congress agree to surrender its Constitutional mandate for oversight. And that panic may be taking place now.

How is it humanly possible for that to be written without the author recognizing that everything he claims to oppose is what he's spent the last eight years endorsing? Even given the well-established authoritarian capacity to simultaneously embrace two precisely antithetical thoughts, wouldn't a minimally functioning human brain -- the kind necessary just to do things like turn on a computer -- alert someone to the fact that the ideas they are vehemently criticizing are the ones that have animated everything they've said and done for the last eight years? How does a human brain evade that recognition?

In the areas of national security and war -- so broadly defined as to include almost everything the President does both abroad and on U.S. soil -- the central theory of the Bush presidency has been, as John Yoo put it: "These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make." The Bush administration's central strategy has been repeatedly to tell courts that they have no right to review the Leader's decisions. The Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, the FISA Amendments Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Patriot Act all provide, to one degree or another, the exact same absolute executive discretion and prohibition on judicial review that the Paulson Plan provides, and in doing so, allows the President to decide which individuals -- including Americans -- are spied on, arrested, detained, rendered, and subjected to all sorts of interrogation methods without any review at all. The administration repeatedly told Congress and courts that what they did -- in general -- was far too secret to allow any oversight or review of any kind.

The same people who cheered all of that on are now parading around proclaiming that "that America exists precisely because of our desire to rein in government and make it accountable to the people" and "only in a panic, in which Congressional leadership abdicates its role to keep executive power in check, would any American Congress agree to surrender its Constitutional mandate for oversight" and invoking the tyrannical specter of Britain's King George, who didn't even possess some of the powers that they insisted on vesting in their own contemporaneous King George.

...

[phantom power]

1. Because now it's about something "important" -- money.

[babylonsister]

2. It defies belief, but the poster above has it right. Money talks, or yells. nt

[Ian David]

3. Now that their MONEY is at stake, they get it? n/t

[tanyev]

4. Hey, they got what they voted for.

Why are they complaining about it?

[Cronopio]

5. The answer is perfectly clear. They're opportunists.

Because they're opportunists, their argument will change as their perception of their own interests (vs. everyone else's) change.

They don't even believe their arguments against the unitary executive now. They just don't like unitary executives that they have told aren't "on their side".

"... wouldn't a minimally functioning human brain ..."

The human brain doesn't work in just one way, and there is more than one flavor of rationality. The threat-based view of rationality ("if you aren't with us, you're against us.") leads to radically different conclusions than the rationality that is more integrative and inclusive.