"“Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.”
-Matt Yglesias
...“More than almost anyone else around, she knows where the levers of power lie, and she is comfortable pulling them, procedural niceties be damned.”
-Matt Yglesias
...Yglesias’s opportunistic support for extraordinary, legally questionable uses of executive power and his dubious claim that “liberals need an iron fist in the White House to make progress” is a naked embrace of the process-be-damned logic that has been contributed to horrific government abuses in both recent memory and U.S. history. Against all that, Yglesias posits that aggressive, norms-violating uses of executive power can bring marginal gains to the domestic agenda of technocratic progressives.
...Why does he think that progressives should embrace that tradeoff? Perhaps his judgement is clouded by his status as a movement wonk: He is far more likely to be invited to a Clinton White House to share his policy views than to have its occupant bomb his ancestral village, surveil the place of worship of his family members, or send him to die in a foreign conflict where the U.S. does not achieve its objectives.
...For whatever reason, Yglesias is apparently blind to the fact that executive power wielded for foreign-policy and national-security purposes is far more consequential in terms of lives lost, money spent, and human rights abrogated than anything the left can achieve domestically through executive orders. This is partly because stupid wars of choice like Vietnam and Iraq are easily the most ruinous projects a country can undertake; and partly because starting wars, killing innocents, and violating civil liberties are irreversible acts, whereas a domestic agenda achieved via executive order could mostly be overruled by Congress or undone by the next non-progressive president."
-Connor Friedersdorf
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/hillary-clinton-dick-cheney-thomas-more/409522/
7 comments:
As Hillary is more comfortable undercutting clear ethical boundaries, Yglesias is more comfortable undercutting clear boundaries of common sense and justifiable popular outrage.
He's the best example of someone overthinking politics and substituting/overusing useless cerebral distractions for the things that matter.
Essays like these will become more important as their race heats up. At some point a reckoning with Hillary! will be essential, and her defenders will need to be called to account. When every third comment on any NYTimes article about the two Democratic front-runners are threats to cancel subscriptions due to rosy shilling for Hillary! (articles about her upcoming plans for displays of AUTHENTICITY!) and benevolently relative disregard for the man catching up to her in support and fundraising capacity, then something foul's obviously afoot and the establishment's up for a rude awakening. At least the right-wing has learned not to dare take their own upstarts and outsiders unseriously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-election-campaign.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-narrows-fund-raising-gap-with-hillary-clinton.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/10/02/us/politics/ap-us-dem-2016-sanders-fundraising.html
It seems to me, a mere laymen in these matters, that presidential powers are mostly granted by a kind of congressional silent acquiescence.
This is why my rage against the Boehners, McCarthys and formerly Cantor is so fierce. The so called RINOS have been a most disloyal opposition. To put it mildly. By not presenting any kind of opposition to Obama, they have not only done damage to themselves, they've damaged the country as a whole.
The country moves forward via the slow pull and tug of checks and balances as brilliantly proscribed in the Constitution. That system has been usurped by this president and this Supreme court and the Congress are partly to blame for letting it happen.
Agree with Ritmo - this is just more hacksplaining. If you talk for a living, you have to say something. We have a lot of people who talk for a living - a multiple of the number we had just a few years ago. More words does not mean more wisdom. Shorter: Hillary is corrupt.
Yeah, but Yglesias meant it. He's not the brightest crayon in the box.
On the other hand, that's the way the presidency is heading in general. I think Congress is abdicating their responsibility so they're not held accountable.
You must not read Yglesias very often. He's a true believer and he thinks the ends justify the means - for the Left. He's written about how happy he was when Andrew Brietbart died and hoped some other conservatives would follow suit.
If you want to think that's "dumb" well, Lenin and Trotsky were "dumb" too.
Yglesias is just a Marxist leftist apologist. It doesn't matter who it's for as long as the ideology is justified.
I said he meant it. Correct, he's not dumb if he is filling his end of the 'rah-rah Dems' contract. They are all rent-seekers, but cognitive assonance is doubtless a comfort.
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