Matthew Yglesias (August 27, 2007) - Coup and Counter-coup (Foreign Policy)

You're way behind the curve on this one, Matt. Something very similar to this scenario has already happened: some months ago, the Cheney faction was agitating for authorization to consider the use of nukes in Iran. Reportedly, just about all of the top brass threatened to resign, at which point the idea was taken off the table. So I think we already know the answer to this one. While it's a relief to know the brass won't go for this insanity, it's bad for a democracy to have to be relying on its military to hem in the elected leadership's lunatic military planning.

Posted by beckya57 | August 27, 2007 7:48 PM

Holy fucking shit, that Atkinson article is creepy. Caesar as a model? Killing all Iraqis and resettling the country with Americans? What a fucking lunatic.

Posted by John | August 27, 2007 7:50 PM

Man, the apocalypse sure is entertaining sometimes.

Posted by live | August 27, 2007 8:00 PM

A coup would be terrible, be it right wing or left wing, no doubt about it. Fortunately with GW at 23% and having only a year to go, it will probably be unnecessary and foolish for anyone crazy enough to think of one.

Just keep all sharp objects (and red buttons) away from GW and wait him out. Keeping US legal and democratic is a lot better than the alternative.

Posted by lawnorder | August 27, 2007 8:00 PM

My best understanding is that it's completely within the president's legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim

No it's not. All uniformed military personnel are obligated not to follow illegal orders. An unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran would be an illegal order. Military personnel would be under no constitutional obligation to follow that order.

Posted by Rob | August 27, 2007 8:00 PM

Martin Lewis at the Huffington Post put out the call for General Pace and the Joint Chiefs to engineer a coup against the Bush administration.

To be fair, he wasn't quite going that far, instead just saying that Bush should be relieved of his command of the military.

Posted by jason | August 27, 2007 8:03 PM

Should the Joint Chiefs (i.e. the military) support Bush if he decides to nuke Iran?

No.

If your question is meant to call into question the larger issue of whether the Joint Chiefs should support an obviously ignorant/stupid/crazy President's ability to act as Commander In Chief...dunno.

The call for an internal military coup is kinda interesting.

Posted by Monty | August 27, 2007 8:04 PM

I'm pretty sure the Joint Chiefs are advisory - they don't have any actual command authority (this is a point made by Judge Posner while trashing something Bork wrote). But I could be wrong.

Posted by Double Guantanamo | August 27, 2007 8:06 PM

"The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead."

Holy fuck. That's as far as I've gotten in the article -- I'll read more as soon as I'm done with this.

Posted by Julian Elson | August 27, 2007 8:10 PM

People are forgetting that Mike Hersh was reporting long ago that a big slug of generals were ready to resign if the order came to attack Iran. I think that was before Rummy's resignation.(I decried the absence of resignation as a tool which could have been used to try and stop the stupid Iraq adventure in a previous thread)

I've a very very strong hunch based upon absolutely zero evidence that Gates would squelch such an attack,, nuclear that is. Quite possibly a surprise conventional bombing assault as well.

I have always seen Gates insertion as an intervention, in the clinical sense, by the 'establishment'. As a check on Cheney, and Bush's worse instincts. If not in a literal sense of some cabal meeting in dim oak paneled leather chaired office somewhere deciding these things but at least in a practical sense.

They have given him his surge because even the most serious Party members still hold out hope for ponies and besides losing a war would be political suicide. In my daydream however there is a line that won't be crossed. That is Iran.

Posted by rapier | August 27, 2007 8:13 PM

Martin Lewis's call for a coup (sorry, jason, but there's really nothing else to call taking away the President's authority over the military) is "interesting" in the way that anything incredibly moronic is interesting, I suppose. Still, it's a very bad idea that makes no sense at all.

My guess is that the Lewis piece gets tons of outraged coverage and the FSM piece gets none at all. Nice work, HuffPo.

Posted by Rob Mac | August 27, 2007 8:16 PM

I feel like I can't even violate Godwin's Law after reading that article. I'm not even sure how to violate Godwin's Law after reading that article.

Posted by Julian Elson | August 27, 2007 8:23 PM

Wow. That's just frightening.

Atkinson doesn't seem to have picked up on the fact that we'd actually be skipping over both Julius and Augustus and going straight to Nero or Caligula. I suppose that's easy enough to miss when you stop taking your meds.

Posted by mwg | August 27, 2007 8:25 PM

"Killing all Iraqis and resettling the country with Americans? "

Hmm. Where have I heard something like this before? Oh, yeah:

"In Hitler's book Mein Kampf, he detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum ("living space", i.e. land and raw materials), and that it should be found in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic peoples. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

Now we know where these volk get their ideas.

Posted by joel | August 27, 2007 9:00 PM

You're way behind the curve on this one, Matt. Something very similar to this scenario has already happened: some months ago, the Cheney faction was agitating for authorization to consider the use of nukes in Iran.

The Times of London had reported last Feb that several generals threatened to resign if we went into Iran. I have a recollection of having read a year or so ago about a threatened mass resignation before a nuclear first strike, but a search came up dry.

I would love to see a citation on this.

Posted by Don | August 27, 2007 9:03 PM

Is this the same Martin Lewis who was a hanger-on of the Beatles at one point?

Posted by James Kabala | August 27, 2007 9:23 PM

"Killing all Iraqis and resettling the country with Americans? "

Change Americans to Christians and you have the essence of Ann Coulter's foreign policy. If you take the time to "double Guantanamo," you probably have Romney's too.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 27, 2007 9:28 PM

Kind of makes you wonder if, in the long term, it's a bright idea to give one person the power to end much of civilization at his discretion.

Posted by El Cid | August 27, 2007 9:29 PM

Does the military follow that order?

Should they?

Uh, no?

Posted by TW Andrews | August 27, 2007 9:35 PM

Martin Lewis wrote:

To be crystal clear - I am NOT advocating or inciting you to undertake any illegal act, insurrection, mutiny, putsch or military coup.

I am NOT advocating or inciting you to interfere with any of the civilian duties of the President. That would not be a legal action by you.

However you have the legal responsibility - under Article 134 of the Uniform Code Of Military Justice - to protect the troops under your command by relieving the President of his MILITARY command.

Pace MY, Martin Lewis may have made a stupid mistake in his interpretation of the law, but he did not call for a coup.

Posted by Arun | August 27, 2007 9:44 PM

Shhhhhh, you idiot.

Posted by Stoic | August 27, 2007 10:01 PM

Lewis's bio at HuffPost describes him in part as a humorist. Just thought that fact should be added to the interpretive mix. The piece, of course, is neither funny nor legally persuasive. But perhaps it was intended as a bit of in-bad-taste wistful and wishfiul thinking that he wasn't intended to be taken seriously. A follow-up post from Lewis might clarify his intent. Incidentally, MY's characterization of the proposal as calling for a coup is at the least misleading.

Posted by jason | August 27, 2007 10:25 PM

Since when did the US become a double for a South American dictatorship from the '70's.

http://political-buzz.com/

Posted by mpp | August 27, 2007 10:27 PM

As I recall, something similar happened during Nixon's reign. One day he just called up SAC and put everybody on high alert for no apparent reason. This was during the Watergate investigations, and some people thought Nixon was actually losing it completely.

I don't imagine Bush doing anything THAT stupid - unless of course he was drunk at the time. By all accounts OUTSIDE OF the MSM, he HAS taken up drinking again and Laura has just about had it with him.

Essentially Cheney is President at this point - except that I expect even Cheney has to keep Bush humored on a day to day basis.

Also Cheney has to find some way to work around the Pentagon's reluctance to engage Iran. The Air Force, of course, is all gung ho to bomb Iran, but the rest of the services know they're the ones who will end up fighting millions of Iranian regulars, fanatical IRGC and guerrillas on the ground. So it would seem Cheney has been unable to get the attack justified on the specious and nonexistent "nuclear weapons program" dodge. Worked in Iraq - ain't working here. It appears the generals are "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice...er, won't get fooled again" types.

This is why Cheney is now recruiting the more right wing and career hungry generals in Iraq to talk up the "Iranians are killing US troops" garbage, and also encouraging the Kurds - who also want the US to attack Iran - to claim that Iran is engaged in incursions into Iraq.

In addition, there are rumors, as I've mentioned in another thread here, that another "9/11" incident is in the offing. (Of course, we've gotten these rumors every year since 2001.)

My guess is that Cheney has organized another incident with the intent of directly blaming Iran for it, instead of "Al Qaeda." And once again, the Israelis appear to be part of the plan, based on reports that the FBI are looking for Israelis in the Western United States.

The concept appears to be that since Bush and Cheney are planning to tag the IRGC as a "terrorist organization", it would be easy to blame the next "terrorist incident" on them. This would give them authorization under the Authorization of Force legislation after 9/11 to initiate an attack on Iran without going to Congress for any further authorization.

And of course, once that starts, there will be no stopping it.

And of course the Pentagon, however much they would hate seeing themselves dragged into a war that many officers know they can't win, won't be able to say "boo" about it.

And of course the Democrats will cave in as soon as the Republicans paint them as "soft on terrorism" as soon as the claim is made that Iran had something to do with whatever incident occurred.

It's foolproof - and since fools are running the plan, it had better be.

The only thing that bothers me is that apparently the San Francisco Bay Area is the target this time - not New York. After all, where is a lot of the opposition to the war coming from - good ol' liberal hippie San Francisco? The right wing nut cases have been aching for this for some time. Didn't O'Reilly once claim that San Francisco should be nuked by terrorists or something?

Looks like Cheney is going to take him up on it.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 27, 2007 10:41 PM

"it's completely within the president's legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that's a pretty disturbing idea."

hence the need for impeachment when it turns out the president is a warmongering psychopath who lied us into a war in Iraq.

Posted by Aaron | August 27, 2007 11:03 PM

Rob wrote: "No it's not. All uniformed military personnel are obligated not to follow illegal orders. An unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran would be an illegal order."

Hell I know a lawyer -- at Berkeley no less -- who Cheney would advise them to call to check on the legal status. And the bombing would be totally legal according to him.

John Yoo, over to you!

[I realize they'd consult Pentagon counsel, but I'm not sure they'd be a whole lot better. And while I'm glad the brass may find an attack on Iran illegal, I'm not at all sure they actually would. Or at least when they resigned, they couldn't be replaced with Jack D. Rippers who would find it totally legal.]

Insanity has been mainstreamed.

Posted by blatherskite | August 27, 2007 11:18 PM

An elected dictatorship

"My best understanding is that it's completely within the president's legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that's a pretty disturbing idea."

Your understanding is that we live in an elected dictatorship. Every four years we go to the polls and elect, or retain in office, a dictator to rule us for the next four years. Roman dictators were also elected, though only for brief terms in that office, usually to deal with a military emergency, because dictators could ignore the normal restrictions on drafting veterans back into the army. We got into this elected dictatorship the same way as the Romans, by being continually at war for the last two generations, but we have gone much further down the path to dictatorship than the Romans (well, at least until the end of their republic), and reacting to much slenderer threats to our security.

You are far from alone in this belief about our Constitution, so that when I characterize this belief as essentially fascistic, I don't mean that you have sought out some extreme belief far from the center. We have allowed an unwritten constitution to usurp the written one, your statement above is utterly conventional, and it would be more accurate to say that the center sought out the extreme of fascism two generations ago, and you inherited fascism from the supposed Greatest Generation.

I mention all of this as a preliminary, because to analyze your statement from the perspective of the Constitution and what follows logically from that, will seem naive and unrealistic from the perspective of the unwritten consitution by which the President is a dictator.

Of course the President doesn't, under the Constitution, have the legal authority to order any act of war, much less acts of genocidal destruction. Only Congress can declare wars. We have found that overly restrictive on the President the last two generations, we don't really accept the idea that Congress is to be entrusted with real responsibility, so our unwritten consitution has dropped the requirement that we have a declaration of war limiting what hostile acts the President can order. We sometimes have AUMFs, or treaty provisions, that can be seen as providing some equivalent to Congressional authorization, but we allow terribly vague, "John Doe", AUMFs, and we aren't even consistent with the idea that they are a prerequisite. If we thought that Congressional authorization was a prerequisite to hostile acts we commit, we would never have abandoned the Constitutionally prescribed vehicle of a Declaration of War as that prerequisite.

Even if we accept the idea that the GWOT AUMF that Congress passed after 9/11, or perhaps the Iraq AUMF it passed in 2002, through their "John Doe" clauses, could reasonably be stretched to the point that they authorized the President to order hostile acts against Iran, to get to your confidence that a Presidential order to commit any hostile act whatever against Iran under either of these AUMFs would be prefectly legal, we have to get to the essence of what makes the powers the unwritten constitution grants the President dictatorial. You have to assume that the President is the sole judge of what the Congress authorized him to do with the AUMFs in question. Now, a reasonable person who imagined that we still lived under a republic might say that the escape clauses in the two AUMFs were put there to allow the President to respond emergently with force to sudden and unpredicted hostile acts that Iran or any other neighboring power might launch against the forces we sent to Iraq, and that hostile acts the President might order against Iran that do not meet such conditions would not be legal. If there were no emergency, and the President ordered an attack on Iran out of the blue, when he had plenty of time to consult Congress to see if they really meant in the Iraq AUMF to authorize nuking Iran because they looked at us funny, then this reasonable person would conclude that the President had not only violated his oath to uphold the Constitution by usurping that body's prerogative to declare wars, but that he had committed mass murder in the nuking itself. But our unwritten constitution allows no one to sit in judgment of our dictator. It is his prerogative to fire USAttys, and no matter if he does this, not for any legitimate public purpose, but for partisan political gain and with clear intent to violate numerous voting rights laws that he has sworn to uphold, his discretion cannot be challenged. The President under our unwritten constitution simply cannot commit any act of malfeasance, nonfeasance or misfeasance in the conduct of his office, because he is the sole judge of the meaning and applicability of any law or AUMF that he is charged with upholding.

Well, at least your disturbed by this whole idea. That's a start. If you want to be even more disturbed, please consider that an elected dictatorship is inherently unstable. Our dictators, by definition, can do no wrong while in office, but lose their official immunity for the many extra-legal things we now expect them to do in what we have let become an extra-Constitutional office, once they step down. This hasn't been a real concern since we started this dictatorship 60 years ago, because all the Presidents since, until now, observed considerable self-restraint. The incumbent dictator, however, has so bungled matters, so alienated so many people, that he stands an excellent chance of not benefiting from emeritus dictator aura sufficiently to keep himself out of jail after he leaves office. This will form a powerful incentive to never leave office. It's why Caesar decided he needed to become Caesar. It's what will inevitably happen sooner or later to make our elected dictators into dictators-for-life, unless we return to the Constitution, and destroy the cancer we have let the Presidency grow into.

Remember, it is now completely within the President's legal authority to declare anyone an enemy combatant and flush them down a legal oubliette. Who would be able to question that designation, should he choose, on far from a chance whim, to apply it to his elected successor, or to any judge or legislator who dared to try to force him to step down from the dictatorship?

Posted by Glen Tomkins | August 27, 2007 11:19 PM

I think sy hersh in new yorker is the one who said generals threatened to resign unless nukes were removed from iran attack plans.

Posted by pontificant | August 27, 2007 11:21 PM

Dude, Lewis' post was satire!

Posted by james | August 28, 2007 3:08 AM

WOW matt u are so fair and balanced. Loonies on the left, loonies on the right, look at me so sensible in the center! Yawn. This brand of faux-moderate centrysteria is what makes me turn of my computer and go try to barehand catch hummyngbyrdz.

Posted by Gregorio | August 28, 2007 3:12 AM

Totally OT, but I never saw Gaffney on any of the talking head shows without him being in dressed in khakis and a blue blazer, like some fuckwit Young Republican fratboy. Needless to say, I hate him. This country needs a Pol Pot just to clean out people like that.

Posted by Kevin Carson | August 28, 2007 3:47 AM

Maybe if we carpet-bombed ourselves for a few years we would end up with a ruthless bloodthirsty cultist fanatic in the white house... oh wait.

Posted by Gregorio | August 28, 2007 3:51 AM

1. I seem to recall that during the last days of the Nixon administration, the Secretary of Defense sent out a memo to various military commanders instructing them to go through the chain of command in following orders. Since the Secretary of Defense was in the chain of command, the implication was that only orders known to have been approved by him were legal orders.

2. More ravings from whackjob Richard Steven Hack. This schmuck seems to fixated on the notion that Mossad agents are everywhere and dwatching everybody, except that they are apparently not watching him.

Posted by SLC | August 28, 2007 7:37 AM

An order for a nuclear first strike on Iran would be a war crime. Such an order would be illegal, and any member of our military receiving such an order would be legally obligated to disobey it. We hanged German and Japanese soliders for obdey less clearly illegal orders.

The president's powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces do not extend to ordering the commission of war crimes.

Posted by rea | August 28, 2007 8:47 AM

If I'm remembering this correctly, in order to launch a first strike a MAC (Missle Action Council) has to be called. That consists of the President, SecDef, and SecState. Two of the three have to agree to launch. I can't imagine this is some sort of legally binding arrangement, but I'm willing to guess that everyone involved would be willing to wait out the legal appeal rather than follow nutty nuclear orders.

Posted by Ed Marshall | August 28, 2007 10:34 AM

Hell I know a lawyer -- at Berkeley no less -- who Cheney would advise them to call to check on the legal status. And the bombing would be totally legal according to him.

John Yoo, over to you!

I was responding to MY's assertion that it would be in the president's legal authority to launch a strike. This is clearly not correct. Whether or not the military would choose to obey such an order is another question. Soldiers choosing to defy orders to launch strikes would be on solid legal footing, John Yoo's opinion notwithstanding.

Posted by Rob | August 28, 2007 11:32 AM

So, I had my comment all written out, as below:

I'm going with the Atkinson article being an (intentional) joke. My Occam's Razor, when applied to this puzzle, gives me Wackjob sits down with wackjob mates, they come up with the most extreme, "rile-up-the-left" article they can imagine, and then slip it through non-existent editing at Wackjob Online Inc. "Slaughter" all Iraqis? Make like Julius Ceasar? Just nuke 'em all? I think y'all been punk'd.

Then I followed the link to TPMCafe's email exchange with Atkinson. And I've been double-punk'd! Oh happy day; this guy really is that crazy. I truly thought he was just giving us what we want to hear. New Occam's Razor: Unhinged Neo-con Edition - just run screaming!

Posted by Sam | August 28, 2007 12:31 PM

Glen Tomkins--hell of a good post there, violating the rule that relevance and coherence are inversely proportional to length of posts on discussion threads.

The erstwhile deconstructionist in me insists on pointing out that your "written v. unwritten Constitution" polarity ultimately breaks down (all texts/laws/documents have to be interpreted), nevertheless it's a very useful descriptor for what's been going on, as you say, for at least 60 years.

I'm impressed that the (now scrubbed) Atkinson piece links up with the published one by--forgetting his name, Bukowsky?--in which he openly longed for another 9/11-scale terrorist attack to "bring us together." Both are instances of the true desires underlying right wing positions coming out of the closet. The yearning for an authoritarian police state, which has been lurking just under the surface since 1948 or so, meets the desire for the cataclysmic event that will make it almost inevitable.

I used to only believe in the LIHOP theory on alternating Sundays. It's periodicity has lately been increasing alarmingly.

Posted by DrBB | August 28, 2007 1:58 PM

Is it at all interesting to discuss this Atkinson guy's ideas? I mean, does he hold a position of any authority, or does he command any particular constituency? In a nation of 300 million people, you can always find someone who will hold any position, no matter how lunatic. I'm reminded of people drawing attention to Fred Phelps and his sordid gang: isn't it better just to ignore them?

Posted by hw | August 28, 2007 2:36 PM

hw: in this case, the answer is 'yes,' in that the piece was published on the site of an organization with high prestige and close connections to W, and the man himself--until he suddenly achieved unperson status--was billed as a "contributing editor." Not just some whackjob out in the wilderness somewhere. This is why most people assumed the piece was a parody when it first turned up. When that turned out not to be the case, it became an important data point, at least, for how far out on the fringe some ostensibly mainstream GOP thinkers are. I suppose the fact that they scrubbed it indicates some level of shame, but whether in their heart of hearts they disagree with its substence is another question:

While democratic government is better than dictatorships and theocracies, it has its pitfalls. FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson describes some of the difficulties facing President Bush today.

I'll say.

Posted by DrBB | August 28, 2007 6:04 PM

Sorry--that was "yes" to your initial question. And "No," by and large ignoring this kind of thing doesn't work. That's what we've tried for the last 20 years or so. As for Fred Phelps, he does vastly more harm to his own cause every time he opens his idiot mouth than an army of pro-choicers, so I say publicize him up the wazoo.

Posted by DrBB | August 28, 2007 6:44 PM

Re: One day he just called up SAC and put everybody on high alert for no apparent reason.

Um, Yom Kipppur War and threatened Russian intervention if the Israelis continued pressing on to Cairo or Damascus. You can argue that Nixon over-reacted and had his own political issues in mind, but "no apparent reason" is not accurate.

Posted by JonF | August 28, 2007 9:21 PM

DrBB,

The Rubicon has already been crossed

I don't subscribe to LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) because I have believed in IHAH (It Has Already Happened) since Congress passed the War Powers Act. If you follow the Constitution, then a President who starts a war without Congressional authorization has both committed the ultimate malfeasance in office, and is also criminally culpable for all the deaths and other damage that occurs in this war, because they would not result from legitimate acts of war, but from the private crimes of a President acting outside the law. A Congress unwilling to apply the remedies prescribed by the Constitution to control a rogue President, that he be impeached, convicted, and criminally prosecuted per the above rationale, will never give any response to the remedy that the WPA replaces these with -- that the President who has started a war on his own be required to send the Congress a note justifying the war within 90 days of the commencement of hostilities -- other than its hearty assent and continued "support for the troops". The WPA was the high water mark of the "liberal" push-back to the "imperial Presidency". If even these folks were unable or unwilling to do more about taking back the power to start wars than pass a toothless law that merely formalized Congress's abdication of the war power to the President, I recognized that it was time to admit that we effectively live in a dictatorship.

It is certainly true that post-WWII Presidents before and since Nixon, until now, have had the sense to not rub our noses in this more than is necessary. Even Nixon had the sense to understand that his usurpations needed to be kept secret. We are as jealous of our democratic traditions, or at least their name and outward show, as were the Romans, who killed Caesar for being too frank about re-establishing a monarchy, but lionized Augustus for assuming a position no less dictatorial, but that he took pains to pretend with all outward shows, did not effectively end the Republic.

Bush is not the problem. The Right is not the problem, at least not what we consider "the Right" in this country in which McGovern, who has never to my knowledge shown any public remorse for dropping incendiaries on Japanese women and children from his B-29 during WWII, is considered impossibly left-wing and pacifist. By any generally recognizable standard, we are all extreme right wing in this country. Fascism has been our shared political ideology since WWII.

Bush, and his political machine, is the problem come to a head. Like an infection that finally shows itself as a frank abscess, after lurking for a long time as vague constitutional symptoms, this presents both an opportunity and a danger. The danger is obvious. An abscess can kill. An actual full-throated, take off the kid gloves, Third Reich style dictatorship, would be a measurably worse place to live in than the dictatorship that dare not speak its name that we have had for 60 years. The differences could be exaggerated even here in the US, and may be entirely invisible to the foreigners who have experienced the wrath of an empire even more destructive than it needs to be to run an empire, because it often acts so blindly in it inability to admit that it is an empire. Bush, for the first time, has raised the prospect that this monster we have created may turn on Americans, instead of "just" tyrannizing expendable foreigners.

The opportunity is that people in this country will be shocked by this recognition, and will properly see Bush as merely a symptom of the wider problem, and act accordingly to bring down not merely this President, but this Presidency that we have created in the last 60 years. We cannot fail to seize this opportunity. For if we who would prefer to return to a republic learn nothing from the Bush debacle, you can be sure that there are folks out there who are paying attention. And even if Bush doesn't try, or tries and fails, to establish an open dictatorship, these folks will learn by the near miss to do it right next time. If Bush doesn't become emperor, and we don't fix the Presidency so that the President is no longer an emperor-in-waiting, the next aspirant will be someone smarter, with a better work ethic, who won't fail.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | August 29, 2007 12:41 AM

Coup and Counter-coup

Comments (43)

Search

Books by Matthew Yglesias

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Weekly Archives

Categories