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
Tony C.
I’ll admit my biases if you admit your prejudices.
I agree the post as written is clearly biased toward the most generous possible interpretation of Obama’s betrayal of his promises, to the point of partisan fantasy.
Obama did NOT have to immediately betray us with secrecy when he promised transparency, with the persecution of whistleblowers when he promised leniency, with the appointment of lobbyists to his cabinet when he promised none would be, with immunity for criminals when he insisted the country must be a nation of laws, with the extensions of tax cuts for the wealthy that he promised they would end, with his craven sacrifice of the public option he promised (on camera) would have to be in any health bill he signed, with his refusal to close Guantanamo, with his willful subterfuge of creating more black-site foreign prisons, with his knowingly unconstitutional claims of the right to assassinate American citizens without any due process whatsoever, with his ridiculous “heads I win tails you lose” redefinition of the criminal justice system to ensure that nobody accused of terrorism, citizen or not, can ever get a fair hearing, trial, or ever be released from prison, innocent or not.
There can be no internal pressures that demand this level of willful betrayal, and those that pretend otherwise are essentially just claiming the same “mysterious and unknowable plan of God” that religionists use to excuse all evil in the world.
Just on the lobbyist front: Obama could have chosen from any number of Ivy League well respected, extensively published, PhD economist, Business, and Finance professors with zero lobbying background that would have been proud to serve their country in finance or economic positions, and their colleges would have happily given them sabbatical to do it: Elizabeth Warren being just one of them. The idea that the people he chose were somehow the best people for the job is ludicrous: Unless the job was keeping Wall Street from panicking by being regulated by somebody that wasn’t a Goldman Sachs legacy steeped in their corrupt, inside-trading, government-bribing ways. Of course in Obama’s eyes, that was the job, because he is a corrupt corporatist that is not on your side.
For all of Mark’s protestations about not drawing parallels, the “young idealist” is transparently Obama, and this is a completely transparent and partisan presentation.
Mark , you totally missed my point , but I’m not surprised . We live in different worlds behind our eyeballs and I’m so glad that we do . Mike was working on your shoes hope they are shining like new 🙂
frank:
“your post tells me more about your character than the character of Paul or hos followers.”
*****************
I try to deal in reality. The reality is that your guy is irrelevant to the election. You may want him to be relevant. You may really, really, really want him to be relevant but polling says he’s not. We can talk character all you want. We can talk who has the best ideas or who would be better for America or whose supporters are most sincere, but the simple fact is that your guy doesn’t appeal to enough people in his own party to merit nomination.We can even debate, as ekeyra does, about whether elections are all about winning or not — although it would be a short debate — but none of those issues makes Paul any more electable. He may be the right message in the wrong bottle but that won’t help him either.
Yours and ekeyra’s are the arguments of the rationalizer and if that is the “character” your selling, I’ll pass. Personally, I haven’t decided who to support in the election, but I have no desire to cast a wasted vote in some forlorn hope that others might “see the light.” That’s Pollyanish.
Frank – let’s not forget Reagen in 1984: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Missy ,
I think with age a lot of people get contaminated by moral corruption and they call it being wise . Just look at the senators who engineered/supported the NDAA, they are full of the same condescending grandiose and obnoxious behavior(as graham said ” shut up you don’t get a lawyer”). I think once these morally corrupt individuals/leaders retire and finally let this country be free of their despicable thinking ( where they justify singing bomb bomb Iran by saying that that’s how military men joke ) this country will come back to its roots . Talking to these “seasoned” lawyers/politicians is a waste of time , you can’t reason with decades of narcissism . Thank God the younger generation is very different and its much easier for it not to confuse wisdom and experience with dishonesty and psychological bankruptsy.
I agree it’s hard to be very confident when one knows a lot because with more knowledge , self or otherwise , also comes the knowledge how little we really know . That’s where we need to rely on the security of dynamic thinking vs that super confidence /arrogance that comes from static thinking .
“Maybe your perception of politics as “your team” verus “my team” is the root of your problem. Its very clear that integrity and concistency are not your priority, “winning” is. Thats very sad, considering how many other people have to live with the consequences.”
Ekeyra,
You’re a regular around here, do you really think that Mark is a “team partisan”? I’ve been around here almost as long as Mark has and to be honest I’m not quite sure where his politics lie, but he hardly appears to be a partisan Democrat, or Liberal for that matter, in his comments and his posts. I think you’ve missed the point of his experiment, by reading into it a false partisanship. This is not a justification of Obama’s actions so much, as it is the presentation of a viable scenario which gives a possibility of why he has behaved in office, differently from his campaign behavior. I think many people have missed what Mark is trying to show. When it comes to the behavior of Presidents, we the public are mostly not party to the internal pressures that exist. We demand that everything is laid out in stark polarities of true or false.
By failing to understand the situational inside pressures, we make judgments colored by emotions, rather than logic. This is a problem for Democracy in that the emotions of us all can be easily manipulated and our emotions inform our logic. Mark’s piece was not a judgment of the correctness of Obama’s actions, but a kind of Rorschach Test of how we judge them. This is not, however, a justification for the Obama activities that have extended the G.W. Bush/Cheney illegalities, but a way of coming to grips with the rationales that must be understood if change is to be effectuated.
Frank, responding to my statement:
“I dont think you can learn humility. Arrogance comes from ignorance.”
My statement which Frank responded to above:
“Frank,
Are you aware that all you present is diatribe. Try cogent refutation for a change.”
With all due deference and humility, I rest my case.
Frank, that is the problem, people with a very little knowledge have all the confidence and they patronize others , and people with a lot more knowledge are full of doubt.
Oh wait, true humility comes from self knowledge! Disregard my last comment Mike, I dont think you can learn humility. Arrogance comes from ignorance.
Mike , try to learn some humility and instead of calling other “bigots” for a change get your head out in sunshine!
Mespo,
Maybe your perception of politics as “your team” verus “my team” is the root of your problem. Its very clear that integrity and concistency are not your priority, “winning” is. Thats very sad, considering how many other people have to live with the consequences.
Frank,
Are you aware that all you present is diatribe. Try cogent refutation for a change.
frank:
Paul’s a wacky old man with ties to both fringe thought and even “fringier” people. Like his fervent supporters he’s got no sense of humor and to him the sky is always falling. Riding a 38% unfavorability rating, Americans like him about as much as they like jock itch and that’s not likely to change. We know the guy; he’s been running long enough. He reminds me of Lyndon La Rouche — right about somethings but wrong about most — in lots of ways including a complete lack of Presidential bearing.
Say what you will about Obama but he got something on the first try that Paul won’t ever get despite running and running– an elected national office.
Keep talking frank. I bet you think the Cubs will be in contention in the fall too.
your post tells me more about your character than the character of Paul or hos followers. Thanks for showing even more clearly your real intent to post your fork writing. Winning sheeple vote to be president on the first attempt with the wallstreet support must be a real virtue and attraction to a character like you and sadly most of the average characters who vote for characters like bushobama. I would rather fail than to mislead people or to rationalize disgusting behaviors
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/02/us-usa-campaign-trump-gingrich-idUSTRE81109A20120202 Trump to endorse Gingrich.
frank:
I see ol’ Ronnie Paul this way. He’ll win right after Lyndon La Rouche does. He’s a pipe dream:
Mespo, In a world where people boo on golden rule, where people who write forks to rationalize the indefensible, where msm asks the most disgusting questions to someone who is not part of status quo, yes it is very hard to defeat the corporate dollars and the full force of the pathetic msm. In a world where harvard produces constitutional lawyers with no respect for the constitution, yes it is very hard. In a world where a lecturer calls himself a constitutional law professor and the university of chicago defends that self title by saying that yes we do call lecturers as professors too, yes it is very hard. However, you think thats something funny but to me thats pathetic!
and mespo, try to expand your awareness of the national polls, though this may not be relevant to your world view:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2012-ron-paul/ron-paul-polls/
mespo, why dont you write another agenda driven fork and try to defend the indefensible dishonest pathetic president who in your world is the man to talk about!