Posted on 09/24/2009 5:24:45 AM PDT by IbJensen
The latest fit of conservative paranoia is that Barack Obama, the alien in our midst, seeks to transform America into Mother Russia, crafting a new totalitarian state that will be run by his own private army of policy ``czars.'' The lunacy never ends.
The Republican right has suddenly discovered the word ``czar'' -- roughly 36 years after it was first used by the press as a nickname for Republican Richard Nixon's in-house energy guy, a Republican named John Love.
The word was rarely, if ever, cited as prima facie evidence of a president's evil intent -- until now, naturally. With strong assists from Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck at Fox News, Republican politicians are suddenly complaining that these policy hires are ``an affront to the Constitution,'' and that Obama ``has more czars than the Romanovs'' (the Mother Russia insinuation, courtesy of John McCain).
Obama-haters are a tad confused about some of the particulars -- many of them think the president is a communist, whereas the czars and the Romanovs were fierce foes of the communists -- but emotion does tend to trump the intellect. And if they can get some mileage while yelling ``czar,'' nothing else matters. Not even the obvious fact that their entire lament is riddled with hypocrisy.
Bush had them, too
Conservatives complain that Obama has hired roughly 32 policy people who can be described as czars, largely because, according to the right's criteria, these White House officials were not confirmed by Congress, or because they supposedly lack formal titles, or because they answer only to Obama. (Beck admitted on his web site that ``the number is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.'' ) Yet, by employing such loose criteria, the roster of so-called czars in the George W. Bush administration totaled roughly 36.
President Bush hired -- among many others -- a science czar, cybersecurity czar, regulatory czar, weapons czar, bailout czar, bird-flu czar, AIDS czar, intelligence czar, Afghanistan czar, war czar, terrorism czar, drug czar, faith-based czar, food-safety czar, Mideast-peace czar, manufacturing czar and Katrina-cleanup czar. (Using the GOP's criteria, that list could easily include Karl Rove, the top domestic-policy adviser who dodged congressional subpoenas; and even Dick Cheney, a duly elected veep who, by withholding crucial energy-policy information from the public, at times appeared to behave like a czar.)
Midway through Bush's second term, the list had grown so long that satirist Andy Borowitz quipped that what Bush still lacked, yet truly needed, was a lying czar. Yet, in all those years, there was nary a cry about imperial Russia from the president's congressional cheerleaders, nor from his fans on Fox.
Past czars unopposed
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander is the guy who called Obama's czars ``an affront to the Constitution,'' but, in 2003, he lauded Bush on the Senate floor for appointing an AIDS czar and a manufacturing czar. Robert Bennett, one of Alexander's colleagues, has assailed Obama's czars as ``undermining the Constitution,'' yet, a decade ago, he told CNN that Bill Clinton needed to get up to speed on the cybersecurity threat by appointing what he called ``a Y2K czar.''
And during the final year of the Bush era, 175 House Republicans (along with 20 senators, including Alexander) voted for a bill to create a new White House job, an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. In translation, that's a czar. All told, when a conservative congressman named Darrell Issa was recently asked on TV whether he and his party brethren had ever opposed Bush's use of czars, he replied: ``No, we didn't.''
The Republican right insists that Obama's czarist tendencies are different, that his whole intent is to evade congressional scrutiny. Fox News, which characterizes Obama's America as ``Land of the Czars,'' recently showed photos of 30 czars and asserted that ``they don't have to be confirmed.'' That bit of reportage was as overblown as Fox's graphic of a czarist crown atop the White House. The fact is, nine of those Obama advisers were confirmed by the Senate, and two were appointed to posts created by congressional statute.
Will facts such as these dampen the ire of those who perceive Obama as a closet czarist who perhaps is bent on replacing The Star-Spangled Banner with the mournful marching music from Dr. Zhivago? Of course not. On the other hand, we'll know that the czar message has lost its sting if they suddenly start insisting that the high number of White House Sturmfuhrers is proof of closet Nazism.
This gets it exactly right!
Nice try but no cigar. Ridiculing critics of the csar mania in the Obama administration without even addressing the background of those appointees assumes readers are too stupid to figure out this article is a juvenile piece of misdirection.
Why are czars evil?
That’s because we serfs never had a king-president before now.
Yeah isn’t it cute when they come out and say, well, Bush had czars and you didn’t object. Bush wasn’t out to destroy the country. ozero is using our systems against us where Bush was busy making sure we didn’t have another 9/11. Also, Mr. Bush never made derogatory statements about the Constitution. There are a lot of us that figured out long time ago that ozero is flat out dangerous to this country.
Dick Polman wrote this? Figures.
I noticed this “Dick” doesn’t mention Senator “Sheets” Byrd’s objection of the czars (on constitutional grounds) in the “piece”.
Bush had them, too ... Past czars unopposed
Uh.. yeah that's right DICKPolman.
The difference is that Bush's czars, or any previous czars weren't self avowed Communists like Van Jones, or Black Nationalist Radical Socialists like 'Diversity' czar, Mark Lloyd, or wall crawling, America hating, barking moonbat Eugenists like John Holdren , or Totalitarians like Cass Sunstein, or Dr Death -- 'Zeke' Emanuel.
Plus DICK in Obama world, 'Czar' stands for 'Commissar'. Though I kinda prefer Obergruppenführer for them.
And Rahm Emanuel's Title is Reichsführer-'US'.
(Equal to that of Heinrich Himmler)
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