"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
George W. Bush - Transition of Power: President-Elect Bush Meets With Congressional Leaders on Capitol Hill - Aired December 18, 2000.
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Shifting of Power From Washington Is Seen Under Bush
Dubya's New Deal - The New FDR
Roosevelt -- Man Of The Century?
By Joseph Farah
JUNE 4, 1999
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America is at a crossroads. We are entering perhaps the most pivotal period in the country's history since the Civil War. The very notions of freedom, individual rights and personal responsibility that made America the greatest nation on earth are at risk. And there is an active effort by some influential elitists to redefine those principles and ideals.
Matt Drudge reports that Time magazine will name Franklin Delano Roosevelt "Man of the Century" in January.
I don't know who the man of the century should be, but I do know that naming Roosevelt is a political act that says much about the thinking at Time. It's also a reflection of the generally corrupt and decadent state of American popular culture.
Drudge adds that Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson plans to write in that special issue about how FDR changed how Americans think about government -- and "what we owe it." And this is precisely why the scoop by Drudge is worth commenting upon.
Who was FDR? And what is his relevance today?
Any objective reading of history must result in the conclusion that Roosevelt abused his presidential powers in a way that was, if not unprecedented, certainly on a scale grander than any U.S. executive since Abraham Lincoln. In his first year in office, Roosevelt issued 654 executive orders, including a sweeping Inaugural Day proclamation that closed all banks for four days to restructure the country's entire financial system -- laying the groundwork for his New Deal revolution.
During the rest of his 12-year presidency, Roosevelt issued some 3,700 executive orders.
In 1933, Roosevelt declared a "national emergency" -- a move that concentrated new powers in the executive branch of government. Though every president since George Washington had used executive orders, Roosevelt took advantage of the fact that Congress had never defined their limits. In effect, Roosevelt, even before America's entry into World War II, became a dictator-in-waiting, assuming powers never imagined for the presidency by the founding fathers.
Before Japan attacked the U.S. in 1941, Roosevelt had already issued executive orders seizing an aircraft plant in California, a shipbuilding company and 4,000 coal mines. Later, of course, in 1942, Roosevelt drafted the executive order that resulted in the placement of Americans of Japanese descent in detention camps.
Roosevelt set the standard for modern presidents in what has become, ever since, a perpetual grab for imperial powers. And why is this so important today? Because the president sitting in the White House today, and scheduled to leave in January 2001, idolizes Roosevelt and has plummeted to new depths in his abuse of executive powers.
Are Time and the rest of the media elite preparing us for even more abuse leading up to the next election? That's the way I see it. Time is planning its biggest selling issue in history around the celebration of tyranny American-style in the persona of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
They are preparing to revise history in an effort to pave the way for yet another power grab by government. Whether it's setting the stage for the continuation of a Clinton presidency beyond his legal term limit or for the election of a new Roosevelt-style politician in 2000, there is a definite agenda at work in the corporate suites of Time Inc. and other assets of the government-media complex.
Because of the groundbreaking power grabs by Roosevelt, America now has a legacy of national emergency declarations that can, at a moment's notice, turn this country into a totalitarian police state. The apparatus for such a coup has been in place since the John F. Kennedy administration. No president has resorted to using the executive order to scrap the Constitution and the balance of power before, but we have never had a Bill Clinton in the White House, either.
This is a president who relishes pushing the envelope -- in his personal life as well as his public life. It was his top aide, Paul Begala, who boasted in 1998 that Clinton would use executive orders to go over the heads of Congress to achieve his legislative goals.
"Stroke of the pen. Law of the land," Begala was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
Later, he told the Wall Street Journal, "This president has a very strong sense of the powers of the presidency, and is willing to use all of them."
It's not always easy to believe what this administration says, but, on this point, I take what they say at face value.
What a time to be glorifying the father of modern presidential power abuse. The next national emergency could well be free America's last.