"not bother to defend their policies"

(( The following is enough like a background position paper, Mr. Bones, to make me think it worthwhile to save it here as well as post it off to vex the common terrorisers. ))

Too bad Bush and Cheney did not bother to defend their policies when they were in office."

I think not. To do that would have been in violation of the Prime Policy of the Busheviki, the master plan, conscious or subliminal, to which everythin’ else the perps ever perpetrated was subordinate.

Naturally I have no idea how they formulated their PP whilst plottin’ amongst themselves. From outside the asylum, the best analyses I know of make it a sort of hypertrophy of previously existin’ wingnut dogmas about "the Unitary Executive." In vulgar liberal accounts this degenerates into a fun scenario in which George XLIII or Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney was out to be a General Franco or a Signor Mussolini personally. Of course with Master Dubya such a notion is merely ridiculous.

With RBC, there is not obviously a joke, but there is a mistake. Neocomrade Cheney was an idealist in his way. He would have wanted all those anticonstitutional emergency powers to be usurped and stored in the White House basement even if there was no possibility whatever that he would ever wield them himself. The thing is quite possible psychologically: one has only to look at Neocomrade Prof. Dr. J. Yoo, Esq., who surely can never have deluded himself that *he* would ever get a chance to mussolinitate!

My private theory about the GOP geniuses with the greatest throw-weight is that they were vindicatin’ the prerogatives of their class. Not exactly Dr. Marx's economic type of class, however, but a rather looser social structure, so loose that it is possible the Yoos and Cheneys and von Rumsfelds and von Wolfowitzen (&c. &c.) never conceptualized it much more distinctly than as "people like us."

To be like them, to belong to the class of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney, means to be capable of Big Management. Actual possession of an M.B.A. degree from

the H*rv*rd Victory School is not indispensible, though it is conveniently emblematic that their Master Dubya happened to be precisely so credentialized. [1]

Now Big Management has been from its inception almost exclusively a disease of the private-or-secret sector, and pretty well everything that is deplorable about Cheneyanity can be accounted for on that basis. Congress and the courts might as well not exist, for Big Managers at ScroogeBank and Warbucks Industries never run into comparable obstructions. The traditional insincere fandango about "your company" must be danced at annual report time, but Big Managers have not the slightest intention of bein’ actually accountable and responsible to anybody external unless they absolutely cannot dodge it. And so forth and so on.

If this theory of the Busheviko-Cheneyite Prime Policy is sound, then it would be absurd to expect the odious perps to "defend their policies when they were in office." Their official policies were no business of anybody but themselves! to start talkin’ about that business unnecessarily outside of the boardroom and executive penthouse would run the risk of encouragin’ incompetent amateur outsiders to think they had some sort of right to know what their betters are up to.

"Give ’em an inch and they take an ell!" Next thing, the ignorant hoi polloi would inevitably start wanting to be *consulted*, perhaps to be able to amend or even veto BigManagerial decisions -- at which point there would, from the Busheviko-Cheneyite or HVS MBA perspective, be scarcely any difference left between the lot of a credentialled BigManager and that of a galley slave.

A corrollary of my theory is that one need not suppose that George XLIII and his merry men had anythin’ special in mind to do with their usurped powers beyond securin’ them in the White House basement. The principal object of the exercise was to ensure that a lowly public-sector POTUS has at his disposal all the tools would have been taken for granted at ScroogeBank and Warbucks Industries. That, too, was part of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney’s curious Pickwickian idealism: it would be an abstract impairment of the dignity of Big Management as such -- entirely without reference to particular persons -- for POTUS not to have all the BigManagerial tools ready at hand. This was a disinterested and even geistlich concern which had not much to do with actually usin’ the tools to perpetrate this-or-that concrete perpetration.

But God knows best.

Happy days.


_____
[1] ’Tis also convenient for some of us to be able to blame as much intergalactic misfortune as possible on alma mater. Though one is mostly only kidding to say so, because Lord Mammon’s other seminaries can not be significantly different from HVS qualitatively.