7 ms·

Ah, those pre-Bush wonder years, when we all could look up to honest politicians.

by scarmig 14y ago

jacquesm 14y ago
The operative bit there is 'nakedly', without any pretense of decency or cover. Just do it and you can get away with it, nobody will lift a finger.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I'd say it's a difference in degree, not in kind, but I would guess that political culture has taken a turn for the worse since GWB. But... I'm not certain of it. Everyone has always complained about politicians. Are GWB's actions really that different from FDR or LBJ or RMN? In terms of respecting cultural/procedural niceties, not in terms of policy. How could that even be measured?
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    I strongly believe it to be more than a difference in degree. It is a signal that something is extremely broken wrt to how the system actually works and how it should be working. It says that the foxes no longer care about the farmer when they're raiding the hen-house because they know he's trussed up and unable to retaliate.
newbie12 14y ago
Yeah, FDR, LBJ and Nixon took the naked use of power to another level. The OP is a bunch of nonsense. Come to terms with it-- this is the action of the Obama DoJ.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Hello newbie12, FDR, LBJ and Nixon are only 'naked' in hindsight. They tried very hard to appear to be as respectable as possible and to hide their power grabs as good as they could. The only person from that era that I could accuse of doing this openly was McCarthy, and ended up censured by the senate. Something has definitely changed.
  - jerf 14y ago
    Nothing happened openly in that era. It couldn't; there was no "open" in any sense we'd recognize here today on HN. You, as a normal citizen, might here about the highlights of political actions a couple of days later, you certainly couldn't hear about the details, and you lacked any effective method of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people in any reasonable period of time to do anything about it if you did. And media was hardly unbiased, with documented instances of wars all but created from whole cloth by media personalities. All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place. Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I would say the change dates to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each of these men did not care about the limits of Presidential power. Both Roosevelt's thought the Constitution was just a guideline. If you think GWB abused power, then the things FDR did would shock you. Other than trying to pack the Supreme Court, he violated the rights of many of his "enemies" in various ways only a government can get away with. If the courts had ruled another way when these people were in power, the USA could be a much better place. Heck, Nixon had price controls (voted to him by a Democratic Congress). GWB is vilified far more than he deserves compared to other Presidents.
    - jacquesm 14y ago
      Thank you, off to do a lot of reading.
      - wglb 14y ago
        Taren, in her remarks at the service, said that Aaron believed that "the way to change something is to first understand it." Lessig also noted that Aaron had probably read more books than anyone in the room.
shadytrees 14y ago
I'm in my 20s and the idea of Bush v. Gore being a watershed moment resonates with me, a loss of innocence occurring at a grand scale while a smaller private individual version happened to me. It's so easy for me to trace recent history back to that moment regardless of actual cause/effect. And I wonder what moment will resonate with the next generation.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

Ah, those pre-Bush wonder years, when we all could look up to honest politicians.

by scarmig 14y ago

Ah, those pre-Bush wonder years, when we all could look up to honest politicians.

The operative bit there is 'nakedly', without any pretense of decency or cover. Just do it and you can get away with it, nobody will lift a finger.

scarmig 14y ago
I'd say it's a difference in degree, not in kind, but I would guess that political culture has taken a turn for the worse since GWB. But... I'm not certain of it. Everyone has always complained about politicians. Are GWB's actions really that different from FDR or LBJ or RMN? In terms of respecting cultural/procedural niceties, not in terms of policy. How could that even be measured?
- jacquesm 14y ago
  I strongly believe it to be more than a difference in degree. It is a signal that something is extremely broken wrt to how the system actually works and how it should be working. It says that the foxes no longer care about the farmer when they're raiding the hen-house because they know he's trussed up and unable to retaliate.

newbie12 14y ago

Yeah, FDR, LBJ and Nixon took the naked use of power to another level. The OP is a bunch of nonsense. Come to terms with it-- this is the action of the Obama DoJ.

jacquesm 14y ago
Hello newbie12, FDR, LBJ and Nixon are only 'naked' in hindsight. They tried very hard to appear to be as respectable as possible and to hide their power grabs as good as they could. The only person from that era that I could accuse of doing this openly was McCarthy, and ended up censured by the senate. Something has definitely changed.
- jerf 14y ago
  Nothing happened openly in that era. It couldn't; there was no "open" in any sense we'd recognize here today on HN. You, as a normal citizen, might here about the highlights of political actions a couple of days later, you certainly couldn't hear about the details, and you lacked any effective method of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people in any reasonable period of time to do anything about it if you did. And media was hardly unbiased, with documented instances of wars all but created from whole cloth by media personalities. All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place. Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I would say the change dates to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each of these men did not care about the limits of Presidential power. Both Roosevelt's thought the Constitution was just a guideline. If you think GWB abused power, then the things FDR did would shock you. Other than trying to pack the Supreme Court, he violated the rights of many of his "enemies" in various ways only a government can get away with. If the courts had ruled another way when these people were in power, the USA could be a much better place. Heck, Nixon had price controls (voted to him by a Democratic Congress). GWB is vilified far more than he deserves compared to other Presidents.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Thank you, off to do a lot of reading.
    - wglb 14y ago
      Taren, in her remarks at the service, said that Aaron believed that "the way to change something is to first understand it." Lessig also noted that Aaron had probably read more books than anyone in the room.

shadytrees 14y ago

I'm in my 20s and the idea of Bush v. Gore being a watershed moment resonates with me, a loss of innocence occurring at a grand scale while a smaller private individual version happened to me. It's so easy for me to trace recent history back to that moment regardless of actual cause/effect. And I wonder what moment will resonate with the next generation.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]