Cult on Kindle
Kindle owners: I’m pleased to announce that the book just came out on Kindle, where it’s number 10,000 something with a bullet. You can download the free sample, and get the whole intro. If you like it, it’s $9.99 for the whole thing, which will be delivered instantly through Amazon’s series of invisible tubes in the sky. Actually, I’m so pleased about this, that I’m this close to paying the money for my own book, like a schmuck.
Sorry for the Radio Silence
I’ve been out of town, in Las Vegas, America’s Museum of Obesity, a sprawling, endless Epcot Center for Drunks. In some ways it’s the Platonic form of America, in others a horrid, weirdly Soviet atmosphere that amplifies our country’s worst qualities. I’d never before seen people ride those “Rascal” mobility carts, not because they’re handicapped, but because they’re fat and lazy. Since I returned, I’ve been buried in work. I wish I had a Rascal with a laptop tray, so I could get work done on the commute home.
But back to self-promotion: Jim Antle, late of the American Conservative, now with the American Spectator, just wrote a nice review of Cult in the Washington Times. Thanks, Jim! (I can’t track down your email).
The Power to Consult about War?
“In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found,” James Madison wrote in 1793, “than in that clause which asks the president to give Congress a courtesy call whenever he’s picked a new country to invade.” Well, no, that’s not actually what he said. It went more like this:
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. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.
How to check that temptation? In 1973, Congress tried the War Powers Resolution, a deeply flawed piece of legislation that has never so much as inconvenienced a president bent on war. Former Secretaries of State Jim Baker and Warren Christopher–and a bipartisan panel of DC bigwigs–have a new answer: semi-mandatory consultation with Congress backed up by a dread “resolution of disapproval” (that the president can veto!). Somehow I don’t think this is going to work.
I haven’t had a chance to read the full report yet, but judging from the coverage and the op-ed Baker and Christopher penned for yesterday’s Times, the Commission’s proposal seems like an exercise in High Broderism. For some serious attempts at putting teeth in the War Powers Resolution, check here and here.
However, as I explain in the Cult of the Presidency, I’m skeptical that any of these megastatute solutions are going to work. Because no Congress can truly bind a future Congress and no statute can force the courts to resolve separation of powers fights they’d rather duck, such legislative solutions tend to be about as effective as a dieter’s note on the refrigerator. Unless and until ordinary voters demand that Congress stand and be counted on issues of war and peace–and defund unauthorized wars–we’ll continue as before. Hey, maybe we are the change we’ve been waiting on.
Things I Wish I Could Un-read
From the NYT Sunday Magazine interview with Uma Thurman’s dad, a Buddhist scholar at Columbia:
What do you think about when you meditate? Usually, some form of trying to excavate any kind of negative thing cycling in the mind and turn it toward the positive. For example, when I am annoyed with Dick Cheney, I meditate on how Dick Cheney was my mother in a previous life and nursed me at his breast.
Neocon Career Advice
First two sentences of a book review by David “End to Evil” Frum in yesterday’s NYT:
In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head.
Cynics for Obama
Here’s a bumper-sticker sentiment that appeals to me. Reminds me of one of Lowi’s Laws:
The Law of Succession: Each president contributes to the upgrading of his predecessors.
And its corollary:
This [i.e., making his predecessor look good] is the only certain contribution each president will make.
Sales Pitch
I doubt I’ll have any other speaking opportunities in the near future that involve shouting at the top of my lungs in a crowded bar. (Which is a shame). So I thought I’d reproduce for posterity the tail end of my remarks Thursday evening:
And I also say, buy my book. It’s a book that is many things:
it is an arrow against tyrants, and a barbaric yawp from one man’s couch;
in a campaign season dominated by mindless crap, it is a cleansing high colonic for the mind;
and it, perhaps more than anything, a love song. A love song for the beautiful losers, the Gerald Fords and the Calvin Coolidges, the Tafts and the Harrisons and the Hardings. For the presidents who get no respect from historians and talking heads, because they didn’t do enough, they didn’t blow enough stuff up, they offered no New Deals, no New Frontiers, no Great Societies, no nuthin’. They were presidents who were content to preside over peace and prosperity without screwing it all up. It’s a love song to them. It sings, where have you gone Warren Harding? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo ooh ooh. Woo woo woo.
All that for 10 bucks. You can’t go wrong.
Yawp.
Book Signing and Happy Hour
If you’re in DC, swing by the Rocket Bar in Chinatown at 6 PM for the America’s Future Foundation Happy Hour, featuring brief remarks by me, and a book signing. I will be pertinent, but I promise not to be sobering.
Heller Good
Congrats to my friends Alan Gura, Bob Levy, and Clark Neily for, against the odds–and with no help from the NRA–making the country a little freer today.
Situational Constitutionalism on the Right
Sam Tanenhaus has a sidebar in today’s NYT Week in Review section called “When Reining in an Imperial President Was the Conservatives’ Cause.” “Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy,” he writes.
Tanenhaus, a longtime student of conservative intellectual history, is absolutely right. In Cult, I have a section entitled “How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imperial Presidency,” that covers the ideological shift in detail. For a taste, click here.
The right-wing intellectuals who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review associated powerful presidents with activist liberalism: the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. Therre was a time when you could hear conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater say the sort of things that would get Sean Hannity to call for treason trials today. Goldwater wrote in 1964 that:
Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.
Heck, it wasn’t too long ago that you could hear John Yoo complain about “The Imperial President Abroad” in the Clinton years.
Recent Media Mentions
In a review for the Orange County Register, J.H. Huebert says Cult is “one of the most important books of the year.”
Doug Bandow has a nice, comprehensive write-up of Cult at Antiwar.com.
Alexander Cockburn quotes from my Reason piece in “The Hope-Giver,” his column for the June 25 issue of the Nation.
Half a Cheer for Carter
The obvious answer to John McCain’s recent, lame, anti-Obama soundbite, “Carter’s Second Term,” is that while Carter was no Gerald Ford, at least the man wasn’t as bad as Richard Nixon, the nearest recent historical parallel to George W. Bush. Though even that may be unfair to Nixon, who after all did not start the Vietnam War, and at least made peace with China. Moreover, despite his extravagant theories of executive power, Nixon at least disclaimed the right to lock up American citizens without charges or a trial, signing the Non-Detention Act of 1971. For the story behind that act, which the Bush legal team considers unconstitutional, see this piece [.pdf] by the indispensible Louis Fisher.
That said, the whole episode puts me in mind of Jim Henley’s tentative libertarian case for Jimmy Carter (see here, here, and here). As Jim wrote two years ago:
His administration deregulated trucking and air travel, market-friendly reforms that had huge, beneficial effects on American economy and life. (I’m old enough to remember when flight was for business travelers and the rich.) He appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed and backed his tight-money policies right through an election year.
I’m not convinced, nor is Jim, entirely. He runs through some of Carter’s bad points, like his godawful energy policy and his creation of two additional cabinet departments (one more than Reagan). I’d add the Desert One operation which, to read Mark Bowden’s account, was the craziest military operation approved by a president since the Bay of Pigs. Of course, Jimmuh’s unbearable sanctimony and self-righteousness shouldn’t count, but I’m sure it’s colored my assessment. But the fact that people reflexively rank Carter among the worst of the modern presidents says something about the bias toward presidential activism that warps our public debate.
Kleg
If I were remotely tech-savvy or good at Google, I’d know the answer to this question, but: where on my Amazon home page can I get a full list of my highlights and clippings from the Kindle? For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using the highlight feature to flag Imperial Presidency-related articles and passages from the NYT and WaPo. I read somewhere that Amazon stored your Kindle highlights and clippings, and it would be really useful, work-and-blog wise if I could get them on my laptop or, even better, print or cut and paste them. Any help appreciated, thanks.
And the Nina Burleigh Award* Goes to…
…Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle for Friday’s column “Is Obama an Enlightened Being?” (answer: yes.):
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare.
Is this guy having us on? Wikipedia refers to his “deeply satiric social commentary column,” though this one seems sincere. Hat tip: South Bend Seven.
* explanation here.
“The All-Powerful Presidency”
Friend and fellow Hoya Jerry Russello has a nice review of Cult of the Presidency at InsideCatholic.com. Jerry’s the editor of the University Bookman, and the author of the highly praised Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.
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