Presidential Transitions (Let's Get Rid of Them)
President-Elect Obama is right; it’s time for a change. Let’s start with the transition.''
Why? Because ''change'' is the watchword and the mantra. And besides, that old document written by some dead old White guys is defective, says he:
The election’s over and not much has happened. But that’s not the way democracy is supposed to work. Besides, doing nothing isn’t good enough in this environment. In fact, doing nothing in the presidency is never good enough; sometimes it’s dangerous. The 9/11 Commission made this point when it included a number of recommendations that addressed the security risks associated with presidential transitions. One implication of the Commission’s report was that the Bush Administration may have missed the warning signs of an impending terrorist attack simply because it was pre-occupied with the transition - and that transition was in peace time in a relatively placid economic environment.
Perhaps it’s time to rethink this structural defect in our Constitution. There’s no way to avoid some of the uncertainty and inefficiency of presidential transitions, but we can certainly reduce the risk. Maybe it’s time to do something about presidential transitions — let’s get rid of them.
[...]
I see no reason not to reduce the length of the transition to a couple of days or at most a week. ''
[Emphasis mine]
A couple of days or a week after the election? Let's just put a revolving door on the White House, and have the outgoing President pack his bags before the election so he can be summarily thrown out a day or two after the election.
And what of the formal process of the Electoral College voting? After all that is the ''real'' election.
Our Founding Fathers set it up this way for a reason, but to liberals and leftists, that carries no weight.
Of course the writer of the article breezily says we should ditch the electoral college anyway, which is predictable leftist rhetoric.
The argument the writer makes in the first paragraph, about the Bush administration's supposed lack of preparedness for the 9/11 attacks, is not a good example, being an atypical scenario. Has the writer forgotten that the absurd election of 2000 dragged on for weeks, and thus slowed down the process of the transition? The election was not officially decided until December 12 of that year, thanks mostly to the childish month-long tantrums and 'hanging chad' shenanigans of the Democrats. Had the election results of November been allowed to stand unchallenged, the transition would have been quicker and smoother.
The other example the writer uses, that of the 1932 election in which FDR defeated Herbert Hoover, is used because of the perceived resemblance between that year and 2008. The implication is that FDR was urgently needed to step in and fix the depression which, as all good liberals know, was created and sustained by Hoover, and resolved by FDR riding to the rescue. Of course it was not as simple as that; many people now acknowledge that FDR's policies probably prolonged the depression, and that only World War II brought some kind of economic recovery.
In the upside-down liberal universe, of course, this cannot be so.
And as to our present situation, surely an untried, inexperienced junior senator who has never held such a high position of authority in any sphere of life is just the guy to come in and magically put things right. We need him and his vast expertise, his wide-ranging experience, you see. Right now, without delay.
''Change'' will be the watchword of the new administration, change for its own sake, without respect or regard for tradition, the established order of things, and that tired old piece of parchment called the Constitution.
I truly think that they will effect change for the sake of change, the better to obliterate as many of our traditions as possible. After all, the past is to be deplored and decried. It was created by dead white males who were also Christians, slaveowners, racists, sexists, and probably homophobes.
And since we are discussing the Change-Agent-in-Chief, the discussion continues about his mysterious missing birth certificate and his curious reticence about his past generally.
Pat Dollard notes that Pravda ran a derisive editorial about this:
While MSM continues to suppress story, Pravda runs editorial laughing at U.S. for not verifying if Obama is a citizen
World Net Daily likewise notes this: Pravda raises Obama eligibility issue
Questions about Obama's citizenship status are spreading like wildfire on the Internet, and some media outlets are beginning to run stories on the issue.
Even the Russian online newspaper Pravda featured a column about "the man with no visible past."
"Barry Sotero, AKA Barack Obama, along with the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission have successfully ignored a Federal Lawsuit asking him to produce a valid Birth Certificate," the piece by Mark McGrew states. "When the time to respond to that lawsuit expired, under Federal Court Rules, they all admitted that he was not a citizen of The United States of America and deemed to have committed fraud. A normal man would have been found to have admitted he was not a U.S. citizen."
While McGrew acknowledges Obama is praised for his way with words, he warns, "Every con man walking free or in jail is an articulate speaker. Who would give their trust to a man who could not use the right words to convince his targets to trust him? Articulate speaking is no way to judge or rate the integrity of a person."
The writer said every con man sells a "dream," pushes a "greed button," stresses "urgency" – and it claims Americans fell for a con man. ''
The left continues to scoff at the controversy, describing it as a 'wingnut' conspiracy theory, and it seems that some on the right are content to dismiss the story in a similar fashion.
The whole situation is bizarre, but I continue to wonder if there is not some method to the madness; I wonder if there is some plan to use this controversy to promote the agenda of removing another troublesome ''structural defect in the Constitution", namely the natural-born citizenship requirement for the Presidency.
The old saying ''if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good conservative principle, and on the question of change, the left and the right are essentially at odds. For the leftist and liberal, generally change is sought, regardless of any potential unintended consequences. Why is that, I've long wondered? It would seem because the liberal and the leftist always see the existing order as flawed -- which it is, because that's the nature of this fallen world, this world of imperfect and imperfectible people. Rather than sorting out which aspects of our world are workable and which are not, which should be preserved, and which should not, the left sees everything as hopelessly bad, and it's always the fault of others, not themselves. They, as they see it, are always the good guys, the ones who are ''part of the solution", which usually entails turning everything upside down.
Conversely, they see the 'old white guys' and their institutions as inherently evil and in need of destruction. They are not and cannot be ''part of the solution" because they are the problem.
I suppose if you see the world in these twisted terms, then change for the sake of change, wholesale, pell-mell change, becomes an imperative. The sooner and the more radical, the better, so says the liberal.
