Hillary Clinton: guilty narcissist

What is it exactly that makes a person want to tell other people what to do? Not once in a while, not on specific matters, but generally. Always. As a career.

We may have the answer, thanks to Professor John Peavoy.

Is Dr. Peavoy a psychotherapist laying claim to a revolutionary new technique of analysis?

Better than that.

He's an old high school friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton who corresponded with her throughout their college years and kept all her letters. Even better, he just gave them to the New York Times.

Times writer Mark Leibovich dug out lots of wonderful lines from the letters, which paint a picture of a young woman who believed her rightful place in the world was at the center of the universe. She had “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star” she wrote once, confessing at another time that as a child, she liked to play in a patch of sunlight in front of her house "and pretend there were heavenly movie cameras watching my every move."

Young Ms. Rodham tried out different roles in her search for other people's confirmation of her world view. "Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” she wrote in April 1967. “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

There is evidence that the world did not give her the reception she desired. Six months later she writes that she "wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially."

But a month later she seems to have hit on the formula. Mark Leibovich writes:

Ms. Rodham becomes expansive and wistful when discussing the nature of leadership and public service, and how the validation of serving others can be a substitute for self-directed wisdom. "If people react to you in the role of answer bestower then quite possibly you are," she writes in a letter postmarked Nov. 15, 1967.

Bingo! Validation! Tell other people what to do, and at last, finally, feel the satisfaction of assuming your rightful place in the universe!

This is the point at which philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand would point out that the philosophy of altruism is pure evil, ending inevitably in dictatorship, and that a philosophy of rational self-interest is essential to human happiness and freedom. Observe:

“Last week I decided that even if life is absurd why couldn’t I spend it absurdly happy?” [Ms. Rodham] wrote in November of her junior year. “Then, of course, the question naturally bellows operationally define ‘happiness’ Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional conservative.”

From there, she deems the process of self-definition to be “too depressing” and asserts that “the easiest way out is to stop any thought approaching introspection and to advise others whenever possible.”

Today Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to college Democrats in South Carolina and proposed a publicly-funded academy that would provide a free education to future public servants. By this, of course, she means she would use tax money that the government has forced you to pay in order to train more people who want to tell you what to do.

"I'm going to be asking a new generation to serve," she said.

That's different. She doesn't usually ask.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested in Ayn Rand's 1964 book, The Virtue of Selfishness.

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The coming cave-in of Arlen Specter

New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg reported Friday that Senator Arlen Specter, R.-Pa., violated the unwritten rules of etiquette for guests of the president aboard Air Force One last Thursday.

Senator Specter's violations of decorum included talking to the reporters on the president's plane and criticizing the president.

Mr. Rutenberg observed that White House officials "seemed none too pleased" about Senator Specter's comments, but neither the officials nor President Bush would make any comment themselves about his remarks.

What did Senator Specter say? This is from the AP's report on Thursday:

Specter, talking with reporters on Bush's plane, took issue with White House decisions surrounding the declaration of executive privilege to prevent top Bush aides from testifying about the firings of U.S. attorneys. A House committee voted this week to hold Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and former counsel Harriet Miers, in contempt for refusing to testify.

Specter said he was incredulous that the administration would not allow the U.S. attorney to prosecute a contempt citation. He said that means the president is claiming sole authority to determine when executive privilege applies.

"That cannot stand up in a constitutional democracy," the senator said.

If the White House seems blithely dismissive of such warnings, it's because Senator Arlen Specter has demonstrated that when it comes to asserting the authority of the legislative branch to check the power of the executive branch, he is a man who can be had.

America Wants to Know fell for Senator Specter's tough talk back in January of 2006, when he declared he would hold a hearing to investigate the secret warrantless wiretapping program that had just been exposed by the New York Times. (See the December, 2005 post, "How the Republicans can lose their majorities.") In a post optimistically titled "The Boys of Article I," we wrote that it was "nice to see somebody stand up to the baseless assertions of unlimited presidential power in time of war."

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Arlen Specter was one of the few people on earth who was in a position to enforce the U.S. Constitution's limits on the president's power. He could have issued subpoenas and demanded answers. He could have made a firm stand against President Bush's ever-expanding, self-conferred, unchecked executive branch power grab, and put the White House on notice that the United States has not become a monarchy just because nineteen dimwitted zealots hijacked planes and flew them into buildings.

But Senator Specter didn't use any of the powers at his disposal. His hearing turned out to be a lot of stern finger-wagging followed by a timid suggestion that the White House consult some judges to see if its warrantless wiretapping program was legal. (See the February, 2006 post, "Rep. Heather Wilson Pries Open the White House.")

Today the ranking Republican, formerly chairman, of the Senate Judiciary Committee finds himself confronting the monster he helped to create. President Bush is now claiming executive privilege to keep his aides from complying with subpoenas from the United States Congress. He has declared he will block Congress from enforcing its subpoenas. He has ordered the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia to refuse to prosecute any charges of criminal contempt of Congress that might be lodged against his aides.

The president, who took an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, is flatly refusing to do so.

While Senator Specter was violating decorum aboard Air Force One on Thursday, he outlined the options available to the legislative branch to enforce its subpoenas. He said Congress could appoint a special prosecutor to handle the criminal contempt citations, switch to civil contempt proceedings, or initiate impeachment.

Don't hold your breath.

"I would still like to see it worked out," Specter told reporters.

The senator was referring to the stalled negotiations between White House counsel Fred Fielding (See the March, 2007 post, "Fred Fielding's bad day") and the Judiciary Committee over the conditions under which the president's aides would testify voluntarily. The White House has offered to let the aides speak to lawmakers as long as they are not under oath, there is no transcript, the session is closed to the press and public, and there can never be a follow-up session to ask more questions.

Even Senator Specter hasn't been able to swallow that.

So President Bush has invoked executive privilege and ordered his aides and former aides not to comply with congressional subpoenas.

In his conversation with reporters aboard Air Force One, Senator Specter said executive privilege is never absolute, because the other branches of government must be able to check the powers of the executive branch. It is "always a judgment call," he said.

That is something of an understatement. Actually, executive privilege is a complete fiction. If you are interested in a scholarly demolition of the so-called historical precedents that underpin the White House's claims, read the 1974 book Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth by the late Harvard law professor Raoul Berger. (Click here to find a copy.)

The short version is this: The Constitution (Article II, Section 4) gives Congress the power to impeach and remove the president, the vice president, and all civil officers of the United States. Inherent in the power to impeach is the power to investigate. The president cannot have, logically or legally, an unwritten privilege to impede the Congress in its exercise of an explicit constitutional power.

President Bush has already demonstrated that he knows this perfectly well. The Supreme Court nomination of former White House counsel Harriet Miers was withdrawn as soon as it became clear that Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee were going to insist on reviewing the work Ms. Miers did in the White House. (See the October, 2005 post, "Senate Republicans fire the big gun.")

Harriet Miers was at the president's side when he received pre-9/11 intelligence warning of al-Qaeda threats. She was there when intelligence reports were arranged to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. She was in the room for the discussions of detention and torture of terror suspects, for the secret arguments over warrantless wiretapping, for the investigation of White House aides in the CIA leak case, and for conversations about firing U.S. attorneys.

No wonder President Bush doesn't want her under oath in front of a congressional committee. If she ever raises her right hand, lightning bolts would fly out of it, straight at him.

America Wants To Know would not be surprised if the White House is making Custer's Last Stand over the U.S. attorneys investigation just to avoid the precedent of Harriet Miers testifying before Congress about anything.

President Bush obviously doesn't think he will suffer the fate of General Custer. And he might not. Not as long as he has pals like Arlen Specter willing to take an arrow for him.

Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested in the December, 2005 post, "Mr. Rumsfeld's mythical privilege."

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Tabloid update: "Bush Heart Drama as Marriage Crumbles"

This week's Globe cover story is no fun at all. It makes a pretty convincing case that President Bush has been secretly receiving medical treatment for "atrial fibrillation, an uneven heart rate that can cause sudden death."

The Globe quotes "a longtime Texas supporter" and "an Ohio political activist" who think the president has been making excuses to visit Ohio--48 times since he was elected--in order to see a heart specialist at the highly regarded Cleveland Clinic.

The tabloid says this all started when the president allegedly choked on a pretzel and fainted back in January, 2002. The fainting spell was actually caused by the irregular heartbeat, the Globe says Bush was told by his doctors. Shortly thereafter, the bulky outline of a device called a LifeVest was visible under the back of Bush's shirts and jackets.

If you'd like to see pictures of President Bush apparently wearing the LifeVest during one of the 2004 debates with Senator John Kerry, click here.

The LifeVest -- here's the link to the Cleveland Clinic's web page about the device -- is "a personal defibrillator worn by a patient at risk for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). It monitors the patient’s heart continuously, and if the patient goes into a life-threatening arrhythmia, the LifeVest delivers a shock treatment to restore the patient’s heart to normal rhythm."

At least it settles the argument over whether President Bush is more like Richard Nixon or more like Lyndon Johnson. If he has successfully hidden a life-threatening health condition for his entire presidency, he's more like John F. Kennedy.

The rest of the Globe article is pretty much what they've been reporting for the last twelve months, but since we promised to keep you updated, here are the highlights:

"On top of his heart worries, Bush is terrified that Laura will walk out on him and file for divorce, leaving him humiliated and alone." Laura has "finally given up" trying to get the president to "stop boozing," and now, fed up with "his increased moodiness and his relationship with Condoleezza Rice," she has concluded that "his personality has changed" and he's not the man she married. He is "desperate to keep her," but she is "just as desperate to get out."

The Globe story concludes by reporting that "respected psychoanalyst and George Washington University professor Dr. Justin Frank worked up a psychological profile of the president and found megalomania, delusions of persecution and omnipotence, and a sadistic indifference to others' pain."

Which just goes to prove that nothing in a tabloid is news.


Copyright 2007

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Dick Cheney's impeachable offense

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as President Bush flew over Louisiana in Air Force One, Vice President Dick Cheney authorized the shoot-down of passenger jets approaching the Washington D.C. area.

He did it, according to a new biography by Stephen F. Hayes excerpted in The Weekly Standard, after a telephone conversation with President Bush in which the vice president expressed his view "that he supported such a directive." The president agreed, Hayes writes. Then:

Within minutes, Cheney was told that an unidentified aircraft was 80 miles outside of Washington. "We were all dividing 80 by 500 miles an hour to see what the windows were," Scooter Libby would later say. A military aide asked Cheney for authorization to take out the aircraft.

Cheney gave it without hesitating.

The military aide seemed surprised that the answer came so quickly. He asked again, and Cheney once again gave the authorization.

The military aide seemed to think that because Cheney had answered so quickly, he must have misunderstood the question. So he asked the vice president a third time.

"I said yes," Cheney said, not angrily but with authority.

Hayes reports that at 10:18 a.m., White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten suggested to the vice president that he notify the president that he had given the shoot-down order. Shortly after Cheney hung up, a passenger plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.

Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told Hayes that everyone had the same question: "Was it down because it had been shot down or had it crashed?" Hayes writes:

Rice and Cheney were both filled with "intense emotion," she recalls, because they both made the same assumption. "His first thought, my first thought--we had exactly the same reaction--was it must have been shot down by the fighters. And you know, that's a pretty heady moment, a pretty heavy burden."

Vice President Cheney told Hayes that he had no regrets:

"It had to be done. It was a--once you made the decision, once the plane became hijacked, even if it had a load of passengers on board who, obviously, weren't part of any hijacking attempt, once it was hijacked, and having seen what had happened in New York and the Pentagon, you really didn't have any choice. It wasn't a close call. I think a lot of people emotionally look at that and say, my gosh, you just shot down a planeload of Americans. On the other hand, you maybe saved thousands of lives. And so it was a matter that required a decision, that required action. It was the right call."

At 10:30 a.m., two minutes after the collapse of the second World Trade Center Tower, the small group in the White House bunker received a warning that "an unidentified aircraft was in flight less than ten miles out."

Hayes reports that Vice President Cheney again gave the order to shoot it down.

For nine long minutes the group waited for news of a plane crash. None came. Hayes writes:

At 10:39 A.M., Cheney spoke to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for the first time. He reviewed the events of the past hour.

"There's been at least three instances here where we've had reports of aircraft approaching Washington," said Cheney. "A couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the president's instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out."

There was quiet on the other end of the line.

"Hello?"

"Yes, I understand," Rumsfeld came back. "So we've got a couple aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?"

"That is correct," said Cheney. "And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple aircraft out."

"We can't confirm that," Rumsfeld told his former aide. "We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it."

Stephen Hayes does Mr. Cheney a great favor by eliminating from this chilling account one immensely significant fact.

The Vice President of the United States is not in the operational chain of command of the U.S. military.

According to the Department of Defense organizational structure, and pursuant to the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, "The operational chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Commanders of the Unified Combatant Commands. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff functions within the chain of command by transmitting to the Commanders of the Unified Combatant Commands the orders of the President or the Secretary of Defense."

Mr. Cheney had no authority under the law or the Constitution to order the shoot-down of a plane over Washington D.C. That authority belonged to the president. In the president's absence, the power to issue a shoot-down order belonged to the Secretary of Defense.

Now you know why the military aide asked Vice President Cheney three times.

Now you know why there was silence on the line when Vice President Cheney informed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that U.S. pilots were in the air with orders to shoot down passenger jets.

Now you know why President Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted on appearing together before the 9/11 Commission and refused to go under oath.

Even if it is true that President Bush agreed with Vice President Cheney that a shoot-down order was the right course of action, the president cannot delegate his position in the military chain of command. If he is unreachable and unable to communicate a military order, the law says the Secretary of Defense is in command.

Certainly it's true that the morning of September 11 was a chaotic and dangerous time, that lives had been lost and more lives were at risk, and that the nation was under attack.

But the military chain of command isn't for tee ball games.

There is no possibility that Vice President Cheney did not know the Defense Secretary's place in the operational chain of command. He is a former Defense Secretary himself. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Cheney illegally and knowingly usurped the power of the president and the Secretary of Defense and issued an order that might have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Americans at the hands of an American pilot.

The United States military is the most powerful and potentially destructive force in the history of civilization. Nothing could be more dangerous to freedom than allowing the control of that force to go up for grabs in an emergency. It is not a small matter when a single government official takes it on himself to set aside the law, passed by the elected representatives of the people of the United States, which designates the military's operational chain of command.

Impeach Dick Cheney.




Copyright 2007


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Ayn Rand's solution to the war in Iraq

The wire service AFP reported today that a U.S. Army Intelligence officer is offering "A Solution to the War in Iraq" on eBay for a Buy-It-Now price of five million dollars.

America Wants to Know tried to find the auction on eBay tonight, but it appears to have vanished.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand gave us the solution to the war in Iraq in a lecture delivered on April 10, 1977. It is reprinted in The Voice of Reason as an essay entitled "Global Balkanization." Read more about it at www.SusanShelley.com in the 2006 essay, "The Motive for War: How to End the Violence in Iraq."


Copyright 2007

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Why the Iraqis don't "step up"

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tried gamely this morning to explain why U.S. troops should continue to patrol the streets of Iraq this summer while the Iraqi government goes on vacation.

Why, CBS News' Bob Schieffer wanted to know, with a surge of U.S. troops in place to give the Iraqi government an opportunity to work on political reconciliation, was the Iraqi parliament planning to go on vacation for the entire month of August?

"They're not," Hadley answered.

Then he tried to explain that while the Iraqi Council of Representatives, the parliament, was taking a break from the summer heat, the hard work of political reconciliation would be taking place from the "bottom up."

Perhaps this would be a good time to offer an explanation, again, for why the Iraqis have not "stepped up" to take control of security and government matters in the way the Bush administration anticipated and hoped they would.

The source of all the problems in Iraq--political, military and economic--is this: the government owns the oil, the oil industry, and all the major industries of the country.

The people who control the government control all the wealth of the country and all the jobs.

The only way an individual can survive in an economic system like that is to show unwavering loyalty to the leader of the group that will provide him with money and employment once the group gets enough power to tap into the stream of government money.

A group that is out of power can expect to starve to death. One way to avoid that outcome is to create violence and havoc and then offer to calm down in exchange for part of that stream of government money.

Government ownership of the economy is not a benevolent system of fairness, equity, and help for those in need. It is a recipe for an endless bloody fight for control of the government.

As an added bonus, there can be an endless bloody fight within each group for the leadership job. It's a pretty good life when you're the guy who hands out all the jobs and all the money, even if you do have to sleep in a different bed every night.

Whether the groups are divided along religious, ethnic, or political lines is not important to understanding why the violence is happening. The violence is caused by an economic system that rewards people not for innovation or hard work, but for blind loyalty and bloody revenge.

Only two things can stop the violence, and we overthrew and hanged one of them.

The other one is free-market capitalism.

We should see if we can persuade the Iraqis to try that.

If the state-owned enterprises in Iraq were fully privatized, Iraqis would be able to work for an array of private companies instead of only for the government. They would be able to buy or earn shares of their country's oil industry. Some people would get rich. Some people would get by. Some people would need help. But every Iraqi would have an independent path to economic survival, and it would no longer be necessary for them to line up with a cleric or a strongman who is trying to take control of the government.

It's a good thing Iraq's parliament has not passed that proposed oil law, because all it would do is entrench the conditions that are causing the violence in the first place. It would give a generous share of Iraq's oil revenue to the private, foreign oil companies that agree to come into the country to rebuild and run the industry, and the rest of the money would still belong to the Iraqi government. Individual Iraqis would not be able to buy shares of their state oil company. They would have to rely on the hand-outs from the Shiite, Kurd and Sunni leaders who would have the legal right to decide which of their supporters get how much of the money.

Think that might cause any hard feelings? Don King should be on a plane right now to try and get a piece of this.

The sad errors of the Iraq policy are about to be repeated in the Palestinian territories, where U.S. leaders speak of "empowering Mahmoud Abbas to provide services," in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who appeared on CNN's "The Situation Room" last week. The thinking seems to be that if the international community funnels vast amounts of cash to the least murderous Palestinian leader, he will hand it out in a way that will make the people of the Palestinian territories content and happy.

In reality, and in history, as long as the government controls all the wealth, there will exist a perfectly rational reason for an armed overthrow of the government. And then another one. And then another one.

In the United States, where the government receives taxes and lease payments from the oil industry but does not own it, nobody is blowing up pipelines no matter how angry they get at the Bush administration. Blowing up pipelines will not starve the Bush administration of revenue or help the opposition take the White House. And if your employer tells you to go and blow up a pipeline, you can call the authorities, because the authorities are not part of the same gang as your employer. And then you can go and find another job, because your employer is not the only employer in the country.

That's why capitalism is more peaceful than state-owned enterprise.

That's why the U.S. Constitution protects life, liberty and property. Private property is the foundation of freedom. You are not free if you are forced to depend on the government for economic survival.

The Iraqi people are not free.

And nothing but savage repression or free-market capitalism will make them peaceful.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "The Motive for War: How to End the Violence in Iraq," as well as the 2004 essay, "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property." You might also be interested in the 2005 post, "Why the Iraq policy isn't working," and the 2006 post, "Playing chess in a burning building."



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