The Pope in Washington

The president of the United States (POTUS) is like a Pope to many in this country. Revered, if he's of your own political party or irrationally despised if he's of the other party in this two party system. And so, many public figures and private citizens threatened to move abroad in 2000 if George W. Bush had been elected. None ever did, of course, and there is never any shortage of excuses. Now, I'm beginning to hear the same from the other side, partisans of the Right threatening to move if She, who cannot be named, is elected.

All of this, hatred and worship are irrational and reflect a certain amount of ignorance about what the POTUS can and cannot do. The first job of the POTUS, one that is seldom mentioned, is to promote and propose policies that do not threaten the economic stability in the country. The President is not alone in this task, and is not always successful, as the economy runs its own course of ups and downs.

The ignorant who elected and worshipped the criminal hillbilly in 1992, tend to think that the President is the one who can keep their sacrament of abortion legal. Others are convinced that their priest of global warming would have kept the country out of war following 9/11.

There are checks and balances on the Presidents and certain things that the followers of various pretenders to the Presidency believe will be done, if and only if their guy is elected, will never be done. Example: Ronald Reagan ran against the government in 1980, promising to eliminate the federal Departments of Energy and Education. You can easily check on how successful he was.

The interesting thing to me is that the haters of the other party's president, however educated they may be, are seldom if ever aware of the ideological basis for their resentments. There is a deep ideological divide in this country, and the best explanation for it that I know of you'll find in Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions. Here is a link to Thomas Sowell's website.

By the way, if you think the "criminal hillbilly" reference above betrays my own partisanship, you should educate yourself on the scandals of the years 1992-2000. The Wall Street Journal, alone among the fawning mainstream media (89% of America journalists vote Democratic) kept track of them and published a compendium of its investigative reports. (If you must know, as a radical Monarchist, I despise them all.)

But here's a small recent example. Sprinter Marion Jones, who for years denied using performance enhancing drugs, and only recently admitted to having lied and returned her Olympic medals, at one point hired a well known operative of the 1992-2000 administration as a publicist to help her with the lies and to divert attention from her use of drugs by attacking in public all those who doubted the lies. From the local newspaper:

Their playbook was thin: Attack your opponents, lie, lie, lie, and try to look good doing it.

This was the famous tactic of this and other operatives of the criminal hillbilly. Oh well, what can you do with the Cult of Personality condemned so long ago by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Secret Speech Delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956.