The sacred responsibility of the President
The Times published the whole letter with annotations. It’s a lot.
To take one item at random…
It is also worth responding to the popular suggestion that the President’s public criticism of the FBI either constitutes obstruction or serves as evidence of obstruction. Such criticism ignores the sacred responsibility of the President to hold his subordinates accountable — a function not unlike public Congressional oversight hearings. After all, the FBI is not above the law and we are now learning of the disappointing results of a lack of accountability in both the DOJ and FBI.
And that’s what Trump is doing, is it? Performing his sacred responsibility to hold his subordinates accountable? By screaming insults at them on Twitter every day? That’s how that’s supposed to be done?
Nixon too tried to “hold the FBI accountable” by telling Haldeman to tell the CIA to tell the FBI to drop its investigation of the Watergate break-in. The CIA did what it was told and that’s why Mark Felt talked to Bob Woodward.
Also what they say there ignores what we’ve been told a million times by now: that the White House is not supposed to meddle directly with the FBI or the DoJ, lest it appear to be interfering with law enforcement. That’s part of the president’s “sacred responsibility” too, we are told.
Mind you, all this does underline what a shit system we turn out to have, when a reckless criminal lunatic like Trump cannot be stopped.
Interesting.
Does this have anything to do with that fact that TheUnitedStatesOfAmerica is a festering shithole?
The President of the USA has one persistently repeated aim: “to make America great again.”
This immediately asks the question: presuming that to be right, how did America become ‘ungreat’?
On the trade front, the answer is that she was overhauled by a major and determined competitor in the International Market Place with historical issues to settle: name of China.
But even worse, as the world’s greatest post-WW2 military power, she suffered an agonising defeat in a war with a poor SE Asian peasant nation called Vietnam.
The US Constitutional setup allowed a bipartisan school of ignorant and blundering politicians to take control of her, and to plunge her into a deadly 10-year war. Which she ignominiously lost. The US is to Vietnam as Nazi Germany was to Poland: totally politically opportunistic and ruthless with lives other than those of its own ruling elite. And completely morally bankrupt.
“Making America great again” could only start with an admission that the US fought a massively evil war against the whole people of Vietnam, and with an offer of serious no-strings-attached economic aid to bring that massively bombed, napalmed, defoliated and murdered country to wherever it wanted to be.
But the US has a war-supporting draft dodger for its Head of Government and Head of State (ie President).
Much of the capital that could have kept ‘America great’ was squandered on that war. Can America recover? Remains to be seen.
Omar, with all due respect I do not think our biggest problems all stem from our war in Vietnam.
Skeletor:
https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/
The US fought Japan for 5 years 1941-45, and the Vietnamese population for 10: 1965-75.(8 years directly and 2 years by proxy). In many ways, Vietnam was as big, if not bigger ,than World War 2 for America, in terms of the economic, status and cultural changes it brought, both at home and abroad.
In Malaya once I met a former officer of the underground First Indian National Army, who had spent the WW2 years in Japan. He said that the Japanese had shown all the peoples of the European colonial possessions in SE Asia that the colonial powers could be defeated. Previously, he and everyone else he knew believed the British Raj to be impossible for any Indian force to defeat. The Raj would rule India for as long as they liked. Anything else was unthinkable.
The Raj’s humiliation by the Japanese changed that forever. In no time at all the British were fighting insurgencies all over their Empire, and were smart enough to soon grant independence to any part which wanted it.
The lesson learned by the British was lost on the French, who had been defeated and occupied at home by Nazi Germany and totally humiliated. But they sought to return to their colonial possessions, and when war resulted in what was French Indochina, were backed by the US.
When the Vietnamese defeated the French, the US stepped up to the plate to receive its own thrashing in turn.
That did for the US what Japan had done for the colonial powers, and what defeat in the Falklands War did for General Galtieri’s brutal dictatorship in Argentina: which never recovered.
Now of course, counterfactual history is a delightful game, though totally unresolvable. But I venture to say that if the US had won in Vietnam, she would not have elected Trump at the last Presidential Election, on his vow to “make America great again.”
Nor would he be about to lead America into a trade war, which any economist will tell you, could easily lead America into another Great Depression: which is what so many of them are presently warning of.
One thing leads to another.
https://adst.org/2014/10/argentinas-dirty-war-and-the-transition-to-democracy/
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/24/opinions/deleon-vietnam-war-effects/index.htm