Very interesting post from Glenn Greenwald at Salon commenting on reports of a lunch Bush had with the neocons last week. It demonstrates starkly the main reason why Bush won’t bend to the will of the American people. He doesn’t believe he’s accountable to the electorate:
Stelzer’s account provides truly illuminating insight into what neoconservatives have been filling the President’s head with for years now, and demonstrates how they have managed to keep him firmly on board with their agenda. The most critical priority is to convince the President to continue to ignore the will of the American people and to maintain full-fledged loyalty to the neoconservative agenda, no matter how unpopular it becomes.
To do this, they have convinced the President that he has tapped into a much higher authority than the American people — namely, God-mandated, objective morality — and as long as he adheres to that (which is achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the Middle East, whereby he is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and history will vindicate him.
There’s a core issue of political theory here. Bush thinks “the constituency to which he must ultimately answer is the Divine Presence”. That’s a premodern view, in the sense that as a person of faith he may well consider himself answerable to God for his personal sins, but as a political leader sovereignty resides with the people, and is not a gift of a God to whom he will have to answer for his political acts. This mindset is really nothing other than the pre-Enlightenment divine right of Kings theory. There’s a good reason why heads of states are accountable downwards to the people, and not upwards to a divinity.
It’s all true. And I have to tell you that I’m so fucking vengeful that you wouldn’t believe it.
You’ll all be laughing out of the other side of your face once the Rapture comes, oh yeah.
These neocons must be very slow at filling things.
God perhaps you can clue us in on this. Has human kind ever devised a drug as potent and dangerous as the military hegemony/moral clarity combination.
Oh yeah. Noah was on this great shit where he thought he was 900 years old, the earth flooded, two of each animal blah, blah, blah. Same with Abraham. It was all burning bushes and kill the kid, and ‘mate I’ve lost me busfare’?
Terrible flashbacks though.
Have your peeps call my peeps and I’ll fill you in.
Hey, God, nice to see you again. We still on for cards at Shiva’s place? I prefer you when you’re in the vengeful Jehovah mode, instead of being weak-as-piss all-merciful Allah. You bet more aggressively and your tics show more.
Chris, probably. A good way to find out would be an extensive empirical survey. Don’t think of it as an ordeal, think of it as cramming for a drug analysis test.
Few things, God. What about Methuselah living 969 years? And what about the three-metre giants, the Nephilim? Then there are those angels that visit Lot: they have dusty feet and are hungry and thirsty after a long journey on foot. Come on, mate, this is all very dodgy stuff. And how come that in the first part of the bible you are a total arsehole, vengeful and childish, murdering innocent people at a whim, then in the second part you are all-merciful and wet and full of ah, grace? Did you realise you had a PR issue going on about 2000 years ago? There was a leakage of membership to competitors, or what?
Bob Carr described the problem well last year on Lateline.
It’s a 180 degree rod neo nuts on one tip and loony left t’other and vibrating evermore violently as numbers build until , like a dog shaking water after a swim, the remainder are in the center.
Anticipating the neo-cons?
“… accounting all men profane that swear not to all their fantasies … making the scriptures to be ruled by their conscience, and not their conscience by the Scripture … he that denies the least iota of their grounds … not worthy to enjoy the benefite of breathing … and before that any of their grounds be impugned, let King, people, Law and all be trode under foot: Such holy wars are to be preferred to an ungodly peace …”
James I wrote the Basilikon Doron, in which this passage appears, as a set of instructions to his son, Henry, on the proper and godly conduct of a king. Henry spoiled all his plans by dying early, giving us King Charles I and all that followed.
The Basilikon Doron and the True Law of Free Monarchies, also by James, are the ultimate expression of the divine right of kings, at least in the English tradition and those politco-legal traditions that developed therefrom. This article inspired me to look at the two essays for the first time in a while, and it is truly scary how much they seem to illuminate the current rhetoric of power in both the US and Australia.
Indeed.