One wonders: where are all those concerned “civil libertarians” so distraught over Bush’s “imperial presidency” now? Their silence is deafening and predictable. Whereas their hypocrisy may as well be wearing a tornado siren.
MARK LEVIN: I’m not into imperial presidents who act imperial and speak imperial and Obama forgets there’s a Constitution. Yes, he keeps telling us he won reelection. Congratulations, but guess what? The Constitution wasn’t up for election, it’s not up for a referendum. He has to comply with it, too.
He was sent back to Washington, but he’s got a strict list of rules that he has to follow as president. When he gets up there and starts saying, if Congress doesn’t do this, I’m going to do this unilaterally, it violates separation of power a lot of the times. And this is a man pushing the edge of the envelope as far as i’m concerned, whether it’s the appointment clause, whether it’s his unilateral action on immigration, whether it’s trashing the commerce clause and the tax clauses under Obamacare. Now they’re talking about executive orders on the Second Amendment. They’ve issued regulations on First Amendment attacking religious liberty. This notion that he might be able to lift the debt ceiling, you know, unilaterally under the Fourteenth Amendment.
What the hell is this? He was elected president. Congratulations. This guy makes Richard Nixon look like a man who followed the law all the time. I think we have an imperial president, he sounds imperial, he’s arrogant as hell and I’m furious about this and I’m going to tell you why. We are a magnificent country. We don’t need to be turned upside down. We don’t need to run from crisis to crisis to crisis. He’s bankrupting this country.
He said we’ve had a discussion about the debt. When did we have a discussion about the debt? We’ve had a debate about taxes. The man’s never around to have a discussion about anything. So, yes, he causes me to be furious when I watch and listen to him. (FOX News Channel’s America Live with Megyn Kelly, January 14, 2013)
Be sure to visit the link and listen to the whole bit of audio — including the predictable FOX News habit of straining for balance by taking the implied stance that partisans fight, and this is somehow business as normal for DC. There’s even a George H W Bush tu quoque argument offered by Meghan Kelly — as if constitutionalists and Bush the Elder are sympatico in anything other than occasional intersections of party designation.
It’s all laughable. And utterly, utterly perverse.
This is fascism. This is a coup. Just because it comes dressed in pleasing nannystate pastel bromides doesn’t make it any less what it is.
(h/t sdferr and neo)
I have been listening to Mark for a while after I saw him mentioned here. He makes a lot of sense. I’m surprised he doesn’t get more negative play from the left.
I think Mark could have responded better to the mention of Bush by noting that neither Bush was a great classical liberal.
Also, is anyone else tired of the “he did it first” trope we hear so much, especially from the left? It’s the cry of a spoiled child.
It’s a bright-yellow smiley-face with a little black square under the nose.
“He did it first!”
“Was it wrong when he did it?”
“Well, yes…”
“Then it’s wrong now.”
[…] Levin apparently watched it. Protein Wisdom has the transcript of Levin’s comments. Here’s the […]
A reply to Don Boudreaux from his correspondent Dick Wagner concerning public debt (and the intellectual legacy of James Buchanan’s Public Choice view):
*** In this respect, government is a financial intermediary no different from a bank. Public debt links people who have projects for which they are seeking support with taxpayers who have the means to support those projects. Some of those taxpayers might well support those projects, but many will oppose them.
As a matter of aggregation, it is correct to say we owe it to ourselves. But the statement is also silly and meaningless. Over any closed set of people, aggregate debts must equal aggregate credits. All this aggregate statement does is obscure the reality that public debt is just one more instrument by which those who are politically dominant are able to stick it to the remainder. ***
Totten had an article on Morocco and its King, with a reference to Game of Thrones. Hmmm…
Obama is like Joffrey Lannister.
old people are very politically dominant I guess
chop chop on those death panels please
It should not surprise me when he stands there and lies so blatantly, but it does. Just like it should not surprise me that the sycophantic press corps drops to their knees and begs for a pearl necklace from him.
1) Teh Won is a pleasing mocha; hardly pastel.
B) There’s a reason I call them “Tu Quoquesuckers.”
iii) We don’t owe the debt to ourselves; that implies that we’re the ones forced to repay. It’s our children and our grandchildren who are paying for the 47%.
d) Did somebody say Joffrey?
he’s a really crappy president and journalists in america are cheap whores – you know – like the kind the secret service meatheads like to fuck
it’s a very real problem
Colin Powell is 76 yrs. old and also a grabby skin-soaked son-of-a-bitch to boot.
we need death panels for fed gov’t bureaucracies
Mark Levin is right: Obama is an imperial president
It was ever thus with Colin Powell, sdferr. My husband served with him and said he was a class A suck up back when they were Captains.
He is an Affirmative Action General.
“there’s nothing noble about pretending that things are ok” paraphrase levin 1/14/13 @ close
PHOTO: Cheney Knew
good wyoming boy that cheney his people is from casper i believe
he do gay stuff too
casper had a gay mayor recently they’re not as socially backwards as people think
casper is anti darwin
I’ve never been to Casper. I had a great aunt who lived ion Cheyenne.
Levin tonight: If Obama oversteps, impeach. Thinking about it, says Congressman.
That’s a great hat Mr. Cheney is wearing.
This is practically off topic but I took a look at the comment thread over at Prof. Jacobson’s place and came across vae victis.
It feels foreign in a way beyond its origin. But, here it is. And, obviously, completely applicable.
Interesting times we live in.
(Definition.)
twisted sumthing
That’s Latin for “I won” or, more colloquially, “deal, bitches” isn’t it?
Vae victis is the Progressive/Democrat motto, and President Obama is “First Democrat.”
Yes, Ernst. Very well done.
Yes, I mean the insult of the thing.
uae uictis reminds me of the young Chekov character in the recent Star Trek movie, intoning (unintelligibly) for the computer his ident. number: uictor uictor etc.
Why am I reminded of a certain remark regarding people jumping off bridges because others did it too?
*cue prog sputtering*
Okay, this is bugging the shit out of me, sdferr. What do you mean?
I really wish youd’ve warned me that the guy who invoked Livy went on to pine for a conservative Alan fucking Alda.
I’m going to get you for tricking me into read that, bh.
I just glanced at the latin on the page Ernst linked, and so it is written ‘uae uictis’. How the heck they pronounced it? I dunno, but the funny through itself up unbidden. On something nearby to that, Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (4 pages, clickable and enlargeable for easier reading), bitching about the pronunciation of modern Greek. heh.
Oh, I just noticed there were 3 latin versions, the latter two which I didn’t look at both go with vae victis: I looked at this one: Latin (Robert Seymour Conway, Charles Flamstead Walters, 1914)
V & U are interchangeable in Latin script bh.
Sorta life how he Ss in the Constitution all look like fs
I reckon people most often invoke wisdom they don’t understand, Ernst. It’s a thing with us.
Nothing has been diminished.
Okay, yeah, v and u. I thought that meaning was imbued with that. Seemed I was missing something.
wy wiktis
weenie weedy weaky
Kaiser said.
What you were missing is that it’s much easier to carve straight lines into stone.
Your Scandi neighbors could have told you
he said reprovingly.
i always said waynie
G and C and I and J also overlap in latin.
Hence Caivs Ivlivs Caesar Octavianvs dei filivs Imperator Avgvstvs
That’s a bowdlerization of Augustus’s titular. I left out the Pontifex Maximus and the Tribunician Potestas and probably another of other things.
And anyway, they didn’t settle on a more or less permanent formal titular until they had to figure out what they were going to call Vespasian.
What is happening here?
I feel it’s all become so muddled that the Chinese may as well invade tomorrow at exactly noon.
i is pronounce e, if I remember my Wheelock.
Veni vidi vici
You’re right and I waswrong about waynee happyfeet. Thank you for the correction.
What is happening here?
The nation has been surrendered to the Gauls without protest? Or something like it. That’s what’s presumed to be known as progress, because science and technology would make the newer generations ever wiser.
These dead languages are going to kill us all!
[Bh winks at the camera.]
Simple, bh:
America’s CHICKENS have come home. To ROOST.
A man hated almost as much as Justice Thomas.
I think of him as more like a lazy, self-righteous spoiled brat surrounded by yes-men.
Fortunately geoff, no one’s talking about banning guns, taking your guns away, All they want to do is prevent gun violence.
I think of him as more like a lazy, self-righteous spoiled brat surrounded by yes-men.
Energetics drift, links-rechts-links,
Left to yesman, yessboss, done’r.
Good.
Americans Buy Enough Guns in Last Two Months to Outfit the Entire Chinese and Indian Armies.
That’s a lot of paper to comb through in order to weed the bad people-killer guns out from the good deer-killer guns.
…by banning guns, taking them away, all to make us “safer” than ever before. :-o
The important thing Patrick, is that they aren’t talking about taking your guns away from you.
Silly rightwingerz are so paranoid
he said laconically.
Speaking in “code words” is another of those Lefty projection things.
An interesting read for sdferr and others on the Kulturswache in particular, but also holding implications for the entire PW community.
It’s getting too late to bother reproducing all the links. Go read Driscoll and follow his links. Or don’t.
heh, I almost (but didn’t until now) add to the suspicious juxtaposition of lifestyle and Jefferson the query: “Are they reading The Gay Science too?” But enough of that.
I saw a clip of the Padishah Emperor talking about tracking gun violence, so I’m predicting some kind of effort to register at least semi-automatic firearms.
Also an end to selling mil-surp ammo to the public (at least in the U.S.). And a ban on importing standard “high-capacity” magazines and maybe even semi-auto firearms.
Not sure if he can actually do that, but it’s not like that’s stopped him in the past, right?
The complaint was never “Bush is an IMPERIAL PRESIDENT!”
It was always “BUSH is an imperial President.”
Not the what, the who. Thus it always ever with them, call the opposition racist while hurling ethnic epithets or throwing Oreos at them.
The hypocrisy is not a bug, it’s a feature. Our problem was letting them get enough of a foothold to convince the ignoranti this is normal and appropriate.
Americans wouldn’t buy so many guns if there were not so many unfortunate boating accidents.
Ernst, the biggest problem for me is ammunition. .308 at anything close to a reasonable price is almost impossible to find.
[…] Do we have an imperial president? […]
Late with the budget, early with the important stuff.
“Gun safety”, “gun violence research”, code words, euphemisms, for will to power and the death of freedom.
Also code words for registration.
Oh goody, novel laws and regulations ready-made to be handily bifurcated into those to be ignored for David Gregory and those to be enforced on the peons.
[…] Jeff Goldstein comments: […]
“Sorta life how he Ss in the Constitution all look like fs”
That was because in older forms of english, there were two forms of “lower case s” , one of which (the one that still is used) was used at the front or end of a word and one (the f like s) which was used in the interior of a word. It disappeared because it was purely ornamental and typesetters got sick of bothering with it.
The Y in “Ye Olde Shoppe” wasn’t a Y at all. It was “thorn” and looks sort of like a y (þ) so was replaced by one. It made a “th” sound. It was dumped because someone figured out that if you have a t and and h that make a “th” sound you don’t need a letter to represent a “th” sound. It originally looked like a hybrid of a lower case of p and b.
Wynn got replaced by uu or w. It made a W dound but looked like a small lower case p with the tail truncated (?).