What liberal infidels will never understand about the "president"

[BurtWorm]

From:


The Church of Bush
by Rick Perlstein
July 20th, 2004 10:00 AM

http://villagevoice.com/print/issues/0429/perlstein.php

Once I interviewed a Freeper who told me he first became a committed conservative after discovering the Federalist Papers. "I absolutely devoured them, recognizing, my God, these things were written hundreds of years ago and they still stand up as some of the most intense political philosophy ever written."

I happen to agree, so I asked him—after he insisted Bush couldn't have been lying when he claimed to have witnessed the first plane hit the World Trade Center live on TV, after he said the orders to torture in Iraq couldn't have possibly come from the top, all because George Bush is too fundamentally decent to lie—what he thinks of the Federalists' most famous message: that the genius of the Constitution they were defending was that you needn't base your faith in the country on the fundamental decency of an individual, because no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent, which was why the Constitution established a government of laws, not personalities.

"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary . . . "

Conservatives see something angelic in George Bush. That's why they excuse, repress, and rationalize away so much.

And that is why conservatism is verging on becoming an un-American creed.

[bloom]

1. "no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent"

Once I wrote to my sister-in-law that I thought Bush* was about 1000 times worse than Clinton (I don't remember what I was responding to from her) and that was the last straw. We no longer email political things.

Of course - she believes the Clintons had dozens of people murdered....


"no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent" while it sounds cynical - I think it is a good basis for laws. I don't trust corporations to not ruin the environment, etc. So I want laws that are enforced. I don't trust that every law enforcement officer will have good intentions and judgement 24/7 as so I want the search and seisure part of the Constitution protected...

[BurtWorm]

2. Not long ago, I was arguing with conservatives about this

trying to make them see that their "just trusting" Bush with his extraordinary wartime powers over the lives of prisoners in Guantanamo, for example, was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. Of course most of them resisted that idea, as well as the idea that they would object to endowing a Democrat--even Bill Clinton--with such powers in the event of such an emergency. But the honest ones eventually did follow their twisted logic to its fundamentally anti-American conclusion, saying that maybe, since 9-11, the Constitution's day was over.