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US Presidents on Presidential Power
Tod Landis writes "Responding to George Bush's statement that he will preserve executive power for his "predecessors", I've assembled a
collection of quotes from those predecessors. Most saw executive power differently..."
I'm no fan of the Dub, but any collection of quotes can easily manipulated to suit your viewpoint via selection bias. It would be better to examine the actions previous presidents took with regard to defending the presidential "turf."
Ceci n'est pas un post.
I'm sitting here with a book on my desk call "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents" by Richard E. Neustadt. Perhaps you should read it. It's very easy to pick & choose random quotes & show an agreement that's really not there. Give me a few minutes & I could create a list of quotes that shows that Bush has a very conservative view of President Power.
In case you're seriously interested, a few other good books are
"The Paradox of the American Presidency" by Thomas E. Cronin
and
"The Ferocious Engine of Democracy" (2 volumes) by Michael P. Riccards.
Is the the Politics section of /. or the Kerry cheering section? I thought that the editors said they would have a balanced selection of stories in this section?
/.? I wish they would hurry up and close the pending sale.
WTF has happened to
Doesn't CmdrTaco have a personal blog somewhere to bash Bush instead of doing so on what was once a good news site?
Not only are the quotes out of context, but they are used in error. Furthermore, congress hasn't declared war since WWII, so it's hard to pretend that Bush doesn't have any precedent if he did go in without approval. Of course, there was approval so this whole "news story" is a farce. Way to go and pull a Dan Rather. At least he finally had to apologize.
Can we mod an entire article as -1 flamebait? Please? And I don't even like the shrub....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Oh, well. At least the color scheme here doesn't make you blind.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
authorized Bush to go after Iraq. He did not make the choice on his own. The House of Representatives voted 296-133 in favor and the Senate voted 77-23 in favor. How was this a unilateral decision on Bush's part?
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More Bush Bashing on
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
than yet another "Bush is an idiot" post.
No this isn't saying Bush is an idiot, it is saying that Bush is dangerous and part of a new group of Presidents starting with Nixon that feel the President is able to declare war without Congress, that ladies and gentlemen is a very different thing, than saying Bush is an idiot.
I am getting quite tired of the baseless claims that people are making. We complain and complain because of the poison that is in politics. Well, let's get our act together and fix it.
Starting right now, let's all be a lot more civil.
Despite our political differences, we are all countrymen, in the national sense and in the sense that we all live in this world. We should respect each other and never ever attack someone's character. Let their actions speak for their character. People will be smart enough to judge for themselves. This includes everyone from John Kerry to George Bush to Saddam Hussein down to everybody in this forum.
We are all able to share our opinions. When we do, let's be clear by prefacing such statements with "I believe" or "I think" or "My opinion is". Let's never ever try to represent opinion as fact.
When we do discuss fact and logic, let's be very careful to get things right the first time. Quote your sources accurately.
The way you attack factual and logical arguments is by attacking the individual claims. For instance, if I claimed that Sadr City is now peaceful, you would attack that claim by showing me reports that it is not. You wouldn't attack that claim by calling me a liar.
If you want to end the poison in politics, you end it with yourself first. Here are my points again.
1. NEVER attack a person or their character.
2. ALWAYS preface your opinions with "It is my opinion that..." or "I feel that...".
3. ALWAYS support claims of fact with evidence, and always quote that evidence accurately. Show your logic in clear steps.
4. ALWAYS attack the claims and the logical steps people make with more or contrary evidence.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Except...for both the Afghani Theater and the Iraqi theater Bush DID go to Congress and got approval. Sure, there's some argument as to approval for what and under what conditions on Iraq, but approval from Congress WAS sought and obtained. So all that we're left with is Bush protecting priviledge for his "predicessors"....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Bush was given authorization to use force, not just to throw more sancations...
Yep, I've certainly heard of the silent majority. Its usually used to represent the majority of people "in the middle". Not the quacks on the left or right.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
All laws are just red tape which can be bypassed. We attribute character to those who choose to not just bypass them.
Back in the 80's, some news weekly ran a story about drug dealers in a major city, and how the size of their "businesses" (measured by gross volume) would make some of them qualified to run medium-to-large businesses. That statement stuck with me, because it completely missed the point. Sure it's easier to build a multi-million dollar business if you can sell an addicting product, never pay any taxes, never apply for a permit, and gun-down your competition to maintain your territorries. The real pros are the ones that can stay within the law and still turn a profit.
Substitute "cook the books" and you see a lot of what we saw from Enron, WorldCom, and others more recently.
In my book, you don't get to claim you won the game unless you played by the rules. If you cheated, it doesn't matter how many points you scored.
By this measure, none of Bush's fiscal accomplishments (were there any?) amount to anything, because they were all claimed at the expense of creating a huge budget defecit.
Nothing he cites as a foreign-policy success earns a point, because he had to use war powers to do it.
And he doesn't even get the benefit of the can't-prove-a-negative think of "nothing bad has happened in the U.S., except for that little 9/11 thing" because of the way he's had to stomp on civil liberties to make that happen.
Give me someone who's ready to play by the rules over someone who can only win by cheating, please.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Since when has "plain text" ceased to be a suitable medium for news? Do we only accept something as newsworthy if the text is full of hyperlinks and wrapped around animated ads?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Actually boomer = nuclear missile submarine. Like the Typhoon (remember "the hunt for Red October?). However the grandparent is still BSing; the cold war is over and the policies that made sense then are no longer sound.
Nothing, and I do mean _nothing_, the president of the united states can do in five minutes will make the slightest difference in the "war on terror". The conflict at the moment is over civilians launching terror attacks against targets on US (and other nations) soil. Really the people who will make the US safe are not the prez and the dept of homeland security, but rather the law enforcement/intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI etc). These are the people who can stop the terrorist, not some HomeSec gestapo. And Bush has damaged the credibility of the States' military intelligence with the whole weapons of mass destruction lie.
You want to stop the terrorists? Then stop electing warmongering cowboys. Really, the United States need not fuel the hatred of extremists by giving them free propaganda. Acting out of fear, and allowing yourselves to be cowed by a snake oil salesmen who claims he will make you "safe" will only make things worse. Kick the bum out of office. And stop picking fights with pissant countries a fraction of your size; it makes you look like a schoolyard bully.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
If I hire Dick Cheney to tell you and 74 of your friends that some person is going to bomb Washington with anthrax drones that don't acutally exist, aluminum centrifuge tubes that don't actually exist, and yellowcake from Nigeria that doesn't actually exist, and you all vote to bomb that person first, does that mean you authorized it?
YES, it does- and it means you're as bad at checking your facts as Dan Rather.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.