The Bush Legacy: Thomas Bray Observed

Time will not tell; the present mess speaks volumes. The only way the Bush years will be judged favorably is if the most bleak and dystopian timelines occurs, with a future so appalling that the living would envy the dead. If Skynet actually became conscious, then Bush would be judged "not too bad" and "we've seen worse". In 2006, an editor of the Detroit News with the appropriate last name of Bray committed an exercise in intellectual sloth and dishonesty-wishing to kill two birds with one stone, as it were- and compared Mr. Bush to Mr. Lincoln.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/president_lincoln_lied_us_into.html

The site is Real Clear Politics, "real clear" being some sort of cypher for "buffoonish" or what not, but one must admire the ardency with which the obscure and dense embrace the concept of real clear-instead of really clear-and common sense and all other Cartesian notions which render them free from the burden of thinking too, too much.  

"Lincoln repeatedly asserted that his aim was to prevent the spread of slavery, not eliminate it in the South. "I believe I have no lawful right to do so," Goodwin quotes him as saying. Thus when he finally issued his Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, freeing the slaves in the Confederate states, his Northern critics claimed that he had misled the country. A bloody and unnecessary war was being fought in a Utopian effort to bring the blessings of democracy to a people who had little experience with it."

In this article, Mr. Bray seems to fail to recognize that the Confederacy started military action by the attack on Fort Sumter. Mr. Lincoln did not initiate military action. Hence, whatever jumbled analogy was lodged in Mr. Bray's head seems to be a distinction, not a simile.  

"Oh, and by the way, where did this President get off claiming, as Lincoln did, that his implied powers as Commander in Chief allowed him to tinker with institutions, such as slavery, expressly acknowledged in the Constitution? Or suspending the writ of habeas corpus, perhaps the most fundamental bulwark of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon tradition? Only much later did Lincoln seek congressional authorization for the suspension of habeas corpus, despite the Constitution's explicit instruction that Congress must agree beforehand. And not until 1865 did the administration get around to pushing for the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery."

One of the problems of War is that War trumps everything, even the Constitution.
Warring parties do not observe the legal niceties. This is the lesson I tried to tell people like Mr. Bray back in 2002 ands 2003. They would have none of it. He still does not seem to "get it", thinking that War, even an illegal War based on the most outrageous of lies, will have many good effects. He gives the impression that he is mixing up expenditures of the Department of Defense on research (which have given us Teflon...and the Internet) with the horrible cost of War.

I do not esteem Abraham Lincoln because he suspended habeas corpus. I consider Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to be a blot on his history. I am not such a mindless, fawning sycophant of those canonized by popular history that I believe everything Lincoln did was somehow magically good! Mr. Bray apparently does. And by casting Lincoln as a saint, he tries to fit the Bush presidency into, if not sainthood, at least into the nave of the church.
 
"But the parallels suggest a degree of modesty among those inclined to see Bush - and his embattled Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - as unmitigated disasters. As with Lincoln, much will depend on the outcome."

And when the outcome is perverse and vile-such as we see with the economy now- who will be held accountable? Will you offer yourself, Mr. Bray? When everything comes due, where will you be, Mr. Bray?

A Study Of History 1

In Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, we see reference to the Dominant Minority, the Internal Proletariat, and the External Proletariat of Civilizations. We shall speak of these again, but for the moment we shall only glance in a cursory manner.

The dominant minority could be conceived as being parallel to the top 5% or 2% of the population which is presently referred to as having been enriched by the present government. The internal proletariat is the rest of the population, condemned to servitude as greeters in stores that sell shoddy goods from foreign lands. The external proletariat had a parallel in illegal aliens ( just as an example - do not take me to task on this.) Notice that the dominant minority was taken by surprise by the hubbub about illegal aliens, and wished to promote a policy of amnesty. Remember how many of the dominant minority had illegals in their employ. How many recent federal appointments were sabotaged by the lack of a green card? The first fellow chosen to follow Tom Ridge as head of Homeland Security fell prey to this. This shows how far apart the dominant minority is from the rest of the population. Not only do they draw themselves further away economically - but the rest of us just shake our heads and say that the rich get richer- but their view of the world tends to become skewed further away from the view of the internal proletariat.

The fervor of the population over illegal immigration shocked the dominant minority. All this example does is demonstrate how dominant minorities rule over the population with which it does not necessarily share the same world view.

This division showed up in the film Apocalypto. The dominant minority of the Indian civilization imposed a religion of terror and reign of violence. Toynbee holds that, as the dominant minority becomes less and less creative - the more it settles matters by brutish and violent methods; the more it abdicates all values bating its greed-the rest of the populace, the internal proletariat, develops its own view of the world, informed by its experiences, its poverty, its abasement, and creates a Universal Church. The Universal Church acts as a chrysalis to pass the culture of civilization from the dying civilization on to its successor, a new civilization. His primary example of this was the Church's role in the decline of Rome and the rise of Europe. Dominant Minorty, internal proletariat, and external proletariat; these are terms to remember.