Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
With apologies to Archbishop of Canterbury John Morton, I’m offering this version of his famous “fork”:
You’re a young idealist standing for the highest office in the land. Against many odds you’ve offered a candidacy of hope and change to an electorate tired of both war and the prior Administration that got them into those wars. There are rumors of widespread atrocities committed by that Administration in response to a horrific terrorist attack on American soil where thousands of your countrymen died. In your capacity as an US Senator, you’ve been briefed on several of these and you see a pattern developing. You’re a Constitutionalist; a lawyer; and a principled man, but you recognize the nation faces a real threat of nuclear holocaust at the hands of committed, well-funded terrorists supported and protected by renegade states and even some of our allies. These terrorists have a fanatical zeal and value martyrdom above self-preservation. You believe that if they acquire weapons of mass destruction the question will not be if millions of people will die, but which millions of people will die.
Riding a groundswell of promise and belief in your promises to restore American values, the electorate sends you to the nation’s capitol to change the way things have been done. During the course of the election, it has become clear that the drain on the economy caused by war, corruption, and old-fashioned greed has left the country in dire financial straits.
On January 16th you are briefed by the nation’s intelligence communities. You are told definitively that the intelligence community has engaged in extraordinary measures to fight America’s enemies which you conclude amount to torture, illegal renditions, detaining innocent people, and even Executive Orders approving the killing of persons deemed enemy combatants. You’ve inherited a Gulag within sight of the American coast and during the campaign you’ve vowed to close it. You are told that many senior members of the permanent intelligence community were aware of and approved the illegal measures employed in defense of the country. Losing these people would severely cripple efforts to defend the country as they form a sizable amount of the intelligence community’s institutional knowledge and memory. You’re also told that these senior intelligence officers have been promised immunity for their actions by the earlier Administration.
You convene your economic advisors who explain to you that the emergency measures adopted by your predecessor and designed to prop up the failing economy may well work but it will take time,and any shock to the nation could disturb this fragile trust building process. If the stimulus fails, the resulting shock could send the nation and Europe into a full-blown depression crippling the efforts to fight terrorism.
Moderate governments in the Mideast have come to you seeking aid to fight the fundamentalist movements that are fueling terrorist recruitment and sponsorship. They tell you that to continue the fight means more money and intelligence from the US or their efforts will be severely handicapped.
What do you do?
A. Continue the illegal policies of the past Administration reasoning that this is war and that your primary goal is to defend the nation at all costs. These repugnant policies seemed to have had some effect in curtailing the terrorist threat and your calling off the dogs is a real risk to your viability as a leader if you’re wrong and another deadly attack occurs on US soil. Another successful attack could throw the markets into a death spiral and the recovery might not occur for decades. You continue with the stimulus program and avoid any investigation of earlier illegal acts concluding that any shock to the fragile economy caused by the turmoil will reap more evil than it alleviates. You also avoid any investigation to eliminate the possibility of crippling the intelligence community. You share money and both illegally obtained and legally obtained intelligence with the friendly Arab states.
B. You reason that principle trumps expediency and stop all illegality. You immediately order investigations into the prior Administration’s handling of the war. You make public the results and bring indictments against wrongdoers. You do so even in the face of prior pledges of immunity reasoning they are void ad initio given our treaty obligations and on principles of international law. You make Herculean efforts to replace the intelligence officers lost to the investigations and you build morale by explaining your policies as being in the nation’s long-term best interest. You do what you can to stabilize the economy but you will not compromise in your efforts to prosecute those who have violated the law. You tell friendly states and Europe you understand their concerns about such a policy but you adhere to the adage that “let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
C. You adopt a middle ground approach reasoning it is best for the country that the economic recovery not be affected by criminal investigations of the American intelligence community and the prior Administration. You believe any move otherwise could lead to a weakening of American strength at the worst time and make that nuclear holocaust against an American city more likely. You change the illegal policies of the prior Administration to stop torture, curtail renditions and if absolutely necessary only to countries that will not use torture. You employ death warrants abroad and only against those your intelligence agencies tell you present a clear and present danger to the US. You fully support friendly states abroad against extremists and provide intelligence to them as well as cash.
D. Your Choice.
Now, the tough part: Defend your choice — and no changing facts that you don’t like in our “hypothetical situation.”
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
(and Ekeyra, it is a both problem.)
Ekeyra, after checking out that guys blog, nothing he says carries any valifity with me. (Have to admit I did not listen to the utube – wanted first to see from whence this fellow, and clip, came)
ekeyra, Obama is not responsible for federal workers tax returns. He does not see their returns. Now if you are talking about Geitner, his infraction was rather minor. He took a day care credit for pre-school tuition. It did not not involve that much money, and he paid it. It was miniscule in the scheme of things.
Carol,
Its not a revenue problem, its a spending problem
Swarthmore,
You dont the slightest whiff of hypocrisy when a president admonishes a nation that we should all “pay our fair share” and then selects cabinet members that dont?
Looks like the federal workers will have to pay up, but they don’t earn that much. They are all taxed at a higher rate than Mitt Romney who earned all his income from capital gains and dividends. I doubt they have Swiss bank accounts or offshore shelters,
When I see these commercials, lately on a lot, lawyers soliciting clients who owe $10,000 or moere in back taxes “I can help you pay 1% of that” it makes me wonder how low the deficit might go if all the tax avoiders paid what they owe.
Elaine: Well it is extortion, but it doesn’t explain why it works, unless he has been funding them all along. Why Norquist and not any other lobbyist? Heck, most corporate lobbyists wouldn’t mind tax increases on the middle class, or even on other corporations as long as they were not the target.
I do not understand why Norquist’s pledge is honored more than others, there are plenty of places for politicians to get money besides Norquist, I should think.
Elaine,
Federal workers owe billions in back taxes
Two percent of the president’s staff, 3% of the Senate staff and 4.2% of the House staff are among the 279,000 U.S. government employees who owe the IRS a cumulative $3.4 billion.
http://money.msn.com/tax-tips/post.aspx?post=ab789642-9f66-414f-8683-8dbc20504dc0
Huh, seems norquist isnt the only one who is anti-tax…
Elaine,
It is extortion plain and simple.
Tony,
It sounds a bit like extortion, doesn’t it?
Breaking Grover Norquist’s spell
Editorial
His grip over the nation’s budget will only be loosened if more GOP lawmakers find the courage to defy him and his no-tax-hike agenda.
November 04, 2011
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/04/opinion/la-ed-norquist-20111104
Excerpt:
Norquist’s bugaboo isn’t communists, but taxes. As head of Americans for Tax Reform, he pressures lawmakers — overwhelmingly Republicans — into signing his organization’s pledge not to raise taxes, and then threatens the political careers of those who deviate.
Elaine,
What would you expect the government to do with that money except hire more TSA agents to monitor twitter all day and protect us from mouthy british teenagers sent here to “destroy america” ?
Dickinson did not give us much insight into why polliticians honor the pledge, they sign all kinds of pledges and break them.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe it would be illegal for a politician to sign a contract that bound him to vote a particular way on issues, in return for support in his campaign, or even just a vote in the election. So the “signed pledge” is as worthless as any other campaign promise.
Why would they keep it? How does Grover Norquist leverage a worthless promise? That is what I would like to know.
Grover Norquist: The Billionaires’ Best Friend
How the anti-tax activist hijacked the GOP on behalf of the rich
By Tim Dickinson
November 9, 2011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/grover-norquist-the-billionaires-best-friend-20111109
Excerpt:
Grover Norquist has never held elected office. He’s not a political appointee or a congressional staffer, and few voters know his name. Yet this anti-tax lobbyist wields immense power over the Republican Party, enforcing a hard-line position that compels the GOP to protect tax breaks for the rich and billions in federal subsidies for America’s wealthiest corporations. “It all comes from a single guy,” says Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator. So how does Norquist do it?
Norquist’s influence over the GOP began in 1985, when Ronald Reagan tapped the little-known staffer at the Chamber of Commerce to head up Americans for Tax Reform, a pressure group organized to push a comprehensive tax package through Congress. With backing from the Chamber, Norquist – a Harvard MBA and former head of the College Republicans – challenged GOP candidates to take a two-part pledge: that they would never raise taxes, and that they would only close tax loopholes if the additional revenue was used to pay for further tax cuts. Before long, he had 102 congressmen and 16 senators signed up.
Over the past 25 years, Norquist has received funding from many of America’s wealthiest corporations, including Philip Morris, Pfizer and Microsoft. To build a farm team of anti-tax conservatives, Norquist shrewdly took the pledge to state legislatures across the country, pressuring up-and- coming Republicans to make it a core issue before they’re called up to the big leagues. “We’re branding the whole party that way,” Norquist says. “The people who are going to be running for Congress in 10 or 20 years are coming out of state legislatures with a history with the pledge.”
Grover Norquist, The Man Who Really Runs The GOP
Swarthmore,
I saw that story and almost wrote about it this weekend. Grover Norquist is a prime example of what is wrong with the Republican Party. It is entirely and officially for the 1 per cent.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/impeach-obama–20120126 Here is a dose of reality. Grover Norquist wants to impeach Obama if he is re-elected if Obama does not extend the Bush tax cuts.
@Mike: You see them as a set of guiding principles/precedents, for good or ill, that determine the direction of nations and lives.
Whether it is the reality or not, I see government as a servant. Celebrities have bodyguards. Their bodyguards do not become their masters and end up commanding the celebrities, taking their money and keeping their books in secret. They stay bodyguards.
I think government should be the same way, our bodyguard, our servant, not our master.
We have lost control of our government, because (as you should know) it is very atypical of human nature to be vigilant about principles when even relatively small gains are to be had and no downside is immediately apparent, or even if apparent, seems statistically unlikely.
The noble sentiment that “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is nothing but a noble sentiment. You will not find a person in a hundred that would take a punch to defend a person with whom they totally disagree.
So perhaps my view is naive, perhaps it is impossible to engineer a government that remains a servant of the people, perhaps people are simply too gullible and easily manipulated and emotional and un-analytical to ever stop the sociopaths from rising to the top.
But that is my idealist view: The government OF the people should be determined BY the people, and the government should be FOR the people, i.e. a servant to the people that protects and benefits them as the people demand, not a master that rules them or decides how they should live or keeps secrets from them.
My first principle of government is that the government stops predation, it protects the weak from being exploited by the strong, including the strength of the government itself.
My second principle of government is that the government oversees the collective actions demanded by the people, and ensures nobody is profiteering from those collective actions and public services; i.e. we get the goods at a fair price.
To me if those principles are met, the rest is details.
Concerning the line, “for good or ill,” I disagree. I think you confuse short term and long term thinking there. I believe that sometimes you have to suffer now to have a better outcome later; some diseases require surgery to correct and if the surgery is refused on the grounds that it will hurt or be dangerous, the illness cannot be cured and will prove ultimately fatal. I believe very FEW social and political problems can be corrected without causing any pain, it is impossible to beat the enemies of change without suffering any damage.
I do not follow principle for good or ill, I follow principle only when I think it is ultimately for the good, even if it causes severe pain along the way.
“(I can, however, imagine a more impossible demand that I could not risk: Are you ready to sacrifice the lives of your wife, your children, your grandchildren, your siblings, nieces, nephews, inlaws and all of your closest friends in the bargain? Because they can prove to you they are serious without harming a hair on your head, or even raising public suspicion.)”
Tony,
I’ve already mentioned that if my own mortality were at stake I could see myself taking the risk, but as in your quote above, I do believe that they are capable of taking such action against those to whom oe is close. I find it interesting that JFK, RFK were murdered. Teddy Kennedy almost killed in a plane crash and car crash. Finally, JFK Jr., who was a lock to become President if he wanted to, dies in a mysterious plane crash, a year after founding a political magazine that could have been his Presidential springboard. I have no proof, but considering the reckless personal activities of many of the 1%, it seems more than coincidental that this particular family has had such bad luck.
I thank you though for your response, since you have replied honestly to my implicit question, as to the fact that dire personal consequences could conceivably be at play here. Whether they are, or not, I’m not sure that either of us wants to really know all the evidence.