Classical Values :: "They Told Me If I Voted For John McCain...."

"They Told Me If I Voted For John McCain...."

It was disturbing to wake up this morning and see the headline "Obama revelling in U.S. power unseen in decades," but alas, it appears to be true:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama is revelling in presidential power and influence unseen in Washington for decades.

Barely 100 days in office, the U.S. president and his Democratic Party have firm control over the White House and Congress and the ability to push through ambitious plans.

Now, with the coming retirement of a Supreme Court justice clearing the way for him to appoint a successor, Obama already is assured a legacy at the top of all three branches of government -- executive, legislative and judicial.

On the corporate front, the federal government's pumping of billions of dollars in bailout money into banks and auto companies has given Obama the power to force an overhaul in those industries, a remarkable intervention in capitalist industries by the state.

Americans are giving him leeway as well. His job approval ratings are well over 60 percent, giving him political capital to undertake big challenges.

His political opponents, the Republicans, are in disarray, reduced in numbers and engaged in an internal struggle over how to recover from devastating election losses in 2006 and last year.

What I find most puzzling is the "decades" part.

Because, I spent the last eight years living under the imperial presidency of George Bush, which was repeatedly described as the worst in history.

Jim Hightower called it "the most massive and rapid expansion of presidential might America has ever known" and "a de facto presidential autocracy."

Not to be outdone, Glenn Greenwald saw Bush as more imperial than even the British King:

we've lived for the last eight years under a President who literally has claimed powers greater than those possessed by the British King; whose underlings have promulgated radical and un-American theories literally vesting him with the power to rule outside of the law, who has exploited a political and media culture devoid of "suspicion of power" when exercised by the White House, and who has acted with no meaningful constraints or checks from Congress and virtually none from the judiciary...

I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon (for whom the term "imperial presidency" was once considered synonymous). But by 2002, senior journalistic stateswoman Helen Thomas had declared Bush the new monarch:

WASHINGTON -- The imperial presidency has arrived. On the domestic front President Bush has found that in many ways he can govern by executive order. In foreign affairs he has the nerve to tell other people that they should get rid of their current leaders.

Amazingly, with Americans turning into a new silent majority and Congress into a bunch of obeisant lawmakers, he is getting away with such acts.

Eventually, John Dean weighed in, declaring that George W. Bush's imperial presidency was "beyond anything in the annals of the modern American presidency," and Dean's meme eventually morphed into the clever phrase (and book title) "Worse than Watergate" with Bush said to be more worthy of impeachment than the imperial Nixon.

And of course (from the New York Times) the Bush presidency was "Just What the Founders Feared."

As to the Bush fascism Bush Hitler stuff, there are millions of hits.

Needless to say, waking up to see Barack Obama reveling in "power unseen in decades" is a pretty terrifying experience.

But I guess they aren't calling him "Barack Milhous Obama" for nothing!

I realize the title of this post is very unoriginal. But they really did tell me that if I voted for John McCain we'd have an imperial presidency.