Thomas wrote:JustWonders wrote: There's been a long tradition in this country (not a rule, just a tradition) that former presidents refrain from criticism of current presidents. Both Clinton and Carter have ignored that tradition on several occasions for political gain.
So did Ronald Reagan. I specifically remember one Op-Ed in the
International Herald Tribune in which he passionately disagreed with the tax increases Clinton proposed. I also remember Richard Nixon's column in
Time Magazine (or was it
Newsweek?). He freely attacked national leaders from all over the world: Domestic or foreign, liberal or conservative. I see nothing wrong with such criticism, no matter which side does it. After all, they're ex-presidents, not mummies.
Yes. It's a very interesting question. Clearly there is something of an unspoken tradition that past Presidents limit their criticisms of sitting Presidents but it isn't absolute and shouldn't be.
I think past Presidents, personally understanding the enormous challenges of holding the post and understanding that a sitting President likely already has critics enough, wish to give the belabored fellow now on the hotseat something of a break. They've been there, and familiarity always breeds empathy. We see this elsewhere too...predictably, the last person to criticize a school principal will be another school principal, etc.
On the other hand, that same familiarity allows a past President a uniquely educated vantage on the policies and statements of a sitting administration. And if some new policy or claim is advanced which the past President perceives, from his uniquely advantaged position, to be seriously dangerous to the country's best interests, how could one not speak up?
As it happens, I saw Carter in an interview early in the week. He voiced a concern which I've been yelling about for three years here. That is, that no one in this administration has spoken to the issue of...will the US military presence in Iraq EVER end? He said he believes it quite possible that a permanent military presence in Iraq may have been a/the fundamental (if covert) reason the war was initiated. And of course, there are a lot of good reasons to think that might be exactly the case. Frighteningly, there are also a lot of good reasons to think that the necessary steps to get from war initiation to that end (eg, manipulating Iraqi elections and "democracy" such that the US cannot be asked/forced to leave) are precisely the sorts of acts and intentions which the Muslim world suspects sit behind this project.
One question that sits in my mind on all this is whether the strategists and think tank boys associated with this administration and the new conservative movement became so enamored with, and confident from, their successes in manipulating public opinion in the US over the last two decades that they thought they could just move their whole package of PR tricks out of Texas and the US and out into the world (including the Muslim world..."they'll greet us with flowers") and keep on winning? And the Suskind piece relates again here, as in so much this administration does...
Quote: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/2004-10-16b.html
