President-Elect Obama's advisers feared in 2008 that authorities would oust him in a coup and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers.
University of California at Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., above, the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration, revealed the team's thinking on Sept. 2 in moderating a forum on 9/11 held by his law school (also known as Boalt Hall). Edley was seeking to explain Obama's "look forward" policy on suspected Bush-era law-breaking that the president-elect announced on a TV talk show in January 2009.
But Edley's rationale implies that Obama, or at least his team, feared the military/national security forces that the president is supposed be commanding -- and that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even after voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.
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Unbelievable. Time for him to pull an LBJ and let somebody who's not scared of the job run for it. Fucking jerks.
The Rethugs have blocked any policy agenda he had anyway, just a coup by another name. I'm so tired of Obama and the incompetents he's surrounded himself with.
And an addendum: If you don't see the Weimar - Nazi dynamic going on here, you're blind.
3 comments:
If only Obama had some of LBJ's arm-twisting fight in him. LBJ bowed out of a second term, but at least he accomplished a hell of a lot on the domestic front in his first term.
If you don't see the Weimar - Nazi dynamic going on here, you're blind.
I'm imagining a scene. It's the first day on a new President's job. Suddenly the Secret Service seizes him by both arms and drags him down to a basement room in the Executive Wing of the White House, where shadowy cigar smoking men sit around a table.
"We want you to see a film", says one of them. And they turn on the projector, and the complete unedited Zapruder film plays on the screen at the end of the room.
"This is what happens when a President decides he's in charge rather than us," says one of the cigar-smoking men. "Remember that."
Then the lights go out. When the lights come back on, the room is empty -- even the table is gone. The only thing to denote that anything was ever in the room is a small pile of cigar ashes on the other side of the room, as if one of the men tapped his cigar on the arm of a chair rather than in an ashtray.
"Who was that?" the new President asks.
"The real rulers of this country," the head Secret Service agent says. "They are the richest ten people in the nation. They will let you know what you must do."
"But I'm the President!"
"So was John F. Kennedy."
Of course, this scene is only imaginary. It doesn't actually happen, right? Right?!
- Badtux the X-Files Penguin
I've had similar thoughts about what the Prez finds out after his inauguration.
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