Tuesday May 10, 2011
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE EXPEDITED PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENTS? It always pays to scan Instapundit, even with the B team in session. Ed Driscoll yells, "ALL HAIL AMERICAN CAESAR!" and following his link we hear:
As you will recall, the beginning of the end of liberty in Rome commenced with Augustus Caesar who compromised the authority of the Senate through the force of arms and basically the Senate became a facade. America is poised with this proposed bill, to morph immediately from a Republic into an empire with the privileged eunuchs of the Senate as window dressing and a dictator – the first American Caesar – at the country’s helm.
And leading the progressive charge is Chuck Schumer (D-NY). No big surprise there. Schumer is an elitist Marxist and a first class progressive who hates America almost as much as he loves power.
What in hell? Go look at the bill he's talking about; it appears to allow the President to appoint such exalted officials as the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Congressional Relations with less than usual interference from Congress. (My scan was not thorough, but I didn't notice Supreme Court Justices or Secretaries of State among the expedited appointments.) Not perhaps the best idea, but at a time in which Republicans block appointments regularly and, it seems, capriciously, understandable.
Yet the Caesar comparison has really caught on among the brethren: "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar?" "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar – S. 67," "Hail Caesar?" "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar," etc.
Oh well, at least they stopped calling Obama Hitler for a minute. And I must approve this new avatar of liberal fascism, on grounds of novelty at least, and hope they can take it further. Maybe when Obama steps up for Planned Parenthood, they can start calling him Caligula. He had something to do with sex, right? There was that movie with Malcolm McDowell.
These guys are very, very late to the Caesarism party.
UPDATE. Some of the belligerati show the usual obsession with "Obama’s string of Czars. Czars that he was supposed to downsize or get rid of. Czars, which in my personal viewpoint, were and still are illegal under the Constitution. But progressives never go away, they just shift..." I don't remember hearing stuff like this in the day of William Simon, Energy Czar under Tyrannus Nixon. But then, the Bircher element had not yet been mainstreamed.
UPDATE 2. The comments are extra terrific on this post -- thanks especially to all those who remember how the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire really worked, and to Angry Geometer, who reminds me that the weak Obama-Caesar imagery making the rounds totally misses the easy layup:
