November 10, 2008 5:33 AM

The beginning...and probably the end...of my career as a book reviewer

For the first time, a president claimed in writing that he alone could say what the law was.

With the Bush-Cheney Imperial Co-Presidency grinding to it's inexorable and inevitable denouement, comparatively little attention has been given to the nuts and bolts of just how sinister the changes in the Executive branch over the past eight years of have been. Having just finished Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, I still find myself in shock that the world's pre-eminent functional democracy has over the past eight years crept so undeniably close to a benevolent dictatorship or, perhaps more accurately, a constitutional monarchy.

Gelman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Washington Post, has done a masterful job of detailing how Dick Cheney transformed the office of the Vice President, normally a purely advisory and ceremonial position, into the pre-eminent policy-making position in official Washington. Cheney, a believer in and proponent of the Unitary Executive theory, worked tirelessly to ensure that Presidential power (and at times the line between the President and Vice President became blurry enough so as to be virtually invisible) was paramount, all-encompassing, and able to be exercised without fear of legal recourse.

In reading Angler, I found myself mentally travelling back to the days of Richard Nixon, when another power-drunk cabal of Right-wing Republicans attempted, rather ineptly, thankfully, to collect all political power in the office of the President. Cheney, having survived the Nixon White House, applied his experience and the lessons he learned from that time to insinuate himself into levels of policy-making unprecented for a sitting Vice President. Literally, almost nothing happened with Cheney's input or assent. Policy could be quashed and careers derailed simply by running afoul of Cheney and his hand-picked staff of zealots. Frankly, Gellman's well-researched and balanced account is a pretty scary read...and it should be a must for anyone who truly hopes to understand just how far our representative democracy has gone off the tracks over the past eight years. Yes, this is what happens when Americans can't be bothered enough to pay attention to what is being done in their name.

Lest y'all begin to think that I might have a future as a book reviewer, trust me when I say that I'm not going to be reviewing my next read: Jenna Jameson's How To Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. I can't imagine that I really need to explain why.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Technorati

Technorati search

» Blogs that link here

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 10, 2008 5:33 AM.

Hope is for suckers...so call me a sucker was the previous entry in this blog.

And you wonder why they lost the election?? is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Contact Me

Powered by Movable Type 5.12