Crunkstitution

Will someone explain to Matthew Yglesias that not only does the Constitution not grant most of the Presidential powers he seems to think it grants, but that it also explicitly forbids most of them. I'm looking at you, Glenn.

But meanwhile, Master Y. inadvertently makes a point that I keep tyring to make, which is that the Constitution is a lousy guide to the nature of the American government. Which is not a surprise! It is a centuries-old codex that's been changed, ignored, addendized, and discarded in the two-hundred year growth of imperial government.

It is in some ways gratifying that the duller leaves of the Ivy League no longer feign surprise when the Obamatollah (as Michael Savage cheerfully named him!) arrogates to himself to right to murder American citizens as well as foreigners. It suggests a small but nevertheless evident increment of maturation in the worldview of our liberal commentariat. Yet by the same lights, it's just as fatuous as ever. I mean, ever thus, dude. Throughout history, it has been easier for rulers, leaders, monarchs, presidents, and potentates of all sorts to launch wars, crush enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations ov da vimyn than to dick around with what we now call "domestic policy," where there are always nobles and aristocrats and moneyed types and palace eunuchs and treasury officials and minor bureaucrats and so forth and so on to confound even the fiat of the Mandate of Heaven. Ours is not an atypical system at all.

All Hands on Deck

Via La_Rana, the Best Comments Evar.

Clever Hopes. Expiring.

If you begin with the premise that nothing about American society or government is especially admirable, that the Constitutional Republic was a dead-letter by the time it was ratified, that our history is a history of slavery, genocide, aggressive expansion, imperialism, and war, and that our great wealth and global predominance were more an accident of available resources and favorable historical circumstances than any particular national genius, then all this caviling about our dying principles and betrayed values seems a little silly. And that is not to say wrong. As a diagnostician of our constitutional malaise, Gleen Greenwald is very good, and yet these sorts of analyses seem myopically focused on the present moment and the current generations. Maybe the harsher reality is that we are and have always been basically a venal, craven, and cowardly society whose committment to equal rights and democracy has never been more than superficial, a fearful and xenophobic people who long ago beat our ploughshares into swords and are now not reaping what we did not sow.

Folles

Also I think it is totally delicious that while John McCain fulminates against the new lavender menace, his totally hot pill-addicted tranny wife is all over the place with her NO H8 photo like a non-equity La Cage chorus boy.

Deportment of Defense

All right. A more considered response to Gaze-In-Da-Mil-Uh-Tarry. On the one hand I have sympathy and think it's probably worth a bit of a fight. As with gay marriage, I find the focus of the struggle, the desire to conventionalize one's own otherness in order to claim the mantle of legal equality to be troublesome, but as we are no more going to dispense with the military than dispense with marriage, institutional discrimination is bad and should be fought and defeated. That said, and on the other hand, the plainer truth of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is that it represents and clearly indicates that gays aren't fighting for the right to "defend their country," but are fighting for the right to go forth and kill foreigners in aggressive, hegemonic foreign wars, invasions, and occupations. Does anyone imagine that thousands of specialists would be getting the boot every year if we were locked in a death-struggle with a conquering foreign power? Of course, no such enemy exists, but if it did, and if its tanks were rolling toward the border, and if every able-bodied young fella were being called up to thwart the mechanized Canadian menace or what-have-you, then you can be quite sure that everyone would quite happily turn and look the other way, let what happens between sailors in the head stay between sailors in the head, if you know whuddahmean. The luxury of enforcing bans on sexual proclivities and other personal pecadilloes is really just another bit of evidence in the ever-accumulating store that demonstrates, once more, that we are not the good guys, and that the Department is not of Defense.

Gaze

I mean, rather than campaigning for the right to serve in the military, I am going to organize a gang of faggots to extend the right to be ineligible for military service to all of humanity.

When Their Eloquence Escapes You

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

-The Times

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They're meaningless and all that's true

The Police

When what was how? Abated? Who? Is this a . . . what day is this?

Money, like law, is basically an exigent phenomenon, and any claims that it even approaches the status of universal convention are bogus. I mean, if you're poor, it's real enough, but at the level of a trillion-dollar annual deficit it is basically a totally self-referential metafictive device.

I'm not a nymphomaniac. I'm a compulsive liar.

Ladies and bents, Ross Douthat.