Adam Bellow Explains Everything

Adam Bellow (to whom I still owe a review) answers my question below and explains what the **** Bush was thinking.

The problem for W is that the ethic of friendship and loyalty that the Bushes cultivate and that brought him to power is threatening now to bring him down. He has made the common dynastic mistake of confusing loyalty and merit; in his eyes, the merit of people like Michael Brown and Harriet Miers consists in their being his friends. They are loyal to him, and their loyalty must be rewarded. Thus in Bush, the very loyalty that was a private virtue has become a public vice. His greatest failing is his inability to hold people accountable for their errors. Because they are his creatures, he seems unable to disown them or even to see their faults. This is an inexcusable failing in a democratic leader. As the Machiavellian FDR would be the first to acknowledge, aristocratic virtues have no place in the modern executive. For while Americans do love a prince, they want nothing to do with a king.

OK, that’s a gotcha, for sure.

10 thoughts on “Adam Bellow Explains Everything”

  1. Mark,
    While, next Adesnik at Oxblog, you’re my favorite lefty blogger, I have no idea why you owe Bellow a “review’. Said debt probably explains why you would post said “explanation”.
    I’m certainly impressed with Adam’s insight into an absolute personal strangers thinking.
    Freakin’ idiot!
    You should know he has no idea, only ideology, of what he’s talking about the minute he writes a creepy line like “his creatures”.
    We, us conservatives, got Souter and Kennedy because they were strangers to the President. Now, somebody POTUS knows and trusts over many years is merely a creature?
    Once more, Left or Right, ideology trumps rationality.
    For G-d’s sake, Bellow reads like a poster to Kos or DU.
    Mike

  2. I disagree somewhat with Mike (above) and I think Bellow has a point, but FDR makes a very poor counter-example.

    FDR’s appointments almost always sucked. Appointing Joseph Kennedy and the equally idiotic Joseph Davies to the crucial ambassadorships of Britain and the USSR (on the eve of the biggest freaking war ever) has to go down in history as an all-time great example of What the **** were you thinking?

    FDR’s court picks rose to even greater heights of dunderheadedness with the appointment of William O. Douglas, the second worst judge in the history of the court – second only to that evil bastard Roger “Dred Scott” Taney. [Taney was the first judge ever appointed by a Democrat; not a good start. In fact, why are Democrats still allowed to nominate judges?]

    When you look at Bush’s cabinet and his previous choice of Roberts, Bush is waaaaaay ahead of FDR on this score, no matter how bad Miers is.

    Granted, he lacks other virtues that FDR had in spades, but life is imperfect.

  3. There is an element in this public perception of ‘loyalty’ that recognizes the basic facts, that some one who advances him/her self by latching onto some one else, does not generally show the potential for leadership or particular merit.

  4. Few criticisms of W make much sense to me but at the same time he has qualities that really bother me. 100% behind him on the war, mixed on other issues, I’m reluctant to judge him too quickly. Nonetheless this criticism seems to me to make sense – at least some of his disquieting and hard to justify behaviour seems to stem from misapplied personal loyalty. I can understand that idea and see some evidence of it. I thought the Roberts nomination brilliant – clearly a conservative but so good a jurist the best of the opposition couldn’t put a dent in his chances. Now this mess. The first time a Bush appointment bothered me was Tom Ridge for Homeland Security just after 9/11. Why not Guliani? Sure maybe he didn’t want it or there were reasons the President didn’t want him but appointing someone with a record of effectiveness to a key post in wartime sure trumps standard political appointments.

  5. lgude,

    Guillani was suggested. However, it was public knowledge that he had a mistress (who he later married) while married.

    Moral purity trumps ability. Of course Clinton was a bit too far in the other direction.

    BTW I do believe cronyism is leading Bush astray. I do like how he is handling the islamofascists.

    I hate the Drug War.

  6. Marc:

    I posted the following in the comment section of Roger L. Simon’s post on the same topic. I know these people pretty intimately, though not since my youth, and I think Bellow has them wrong. He gives them both too little, and too much, credit. Were it not for the low quality of their opposition they’d be impossible to remember. Anyway, here’s what I said to Herr Simon:

    The whole thing sounds rational, but I’m not sure what noble virtue Bellow plans to put in the place of friendship and loyalty. It seems to me that there’s all too little of it, especially in that rarified realm of political-beltway insiding. But the other mistake that Bellow makes is to conclude that Bush is an especially good friend, or that his friends are especially good or loyal. Though my experience in that realm is a little limitted, it’s not entirely so, and I don’t recall those folks being much more than middle-depth decent-weather friends. The friendships are as much about display as loyalty, and there’s a lot of vanity involved.

    [Note: Bellow infuses this analysis with a kind of nobility it doesn’t deserve. There’s not really any larger ethic of loyalty here. Not, for instance, in comparison to the kind of loyalty exhibited by genuine “brothers in arms,” which is founded on something substancial. The fact that one was an intimate who went to school with these folks in one’s youth would mean nothing to them it one were not decked out in the right regalia. I know whereof I speak.]

    Interestingly, I went to school with Harriet Miers, and recall her as a somewhat tall and geeky Tri-Delt. It’s unlikely she’d ever turn into a Souter. I also don’t think she’ll be much like O’Connor, whose thoughts were hardly disciplined by any mathematical inclination. I’d say that the reason Harriet didn’t make a bigger splash in the Law is precisely because she is a bit geeky, and she’s liable to bring a surprising precision to the task now that he doesn’t need to be showy.

    I’ve supported Bush since 9/11 even though I didn’t vote for him in 2000. But I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Gore, and did vote for Bush in 2004. I don’t want to see another Bush in the White House though. And that means no George Allen as well as Jeb. It’s not so much that I dislike those folks, and I think they’ve been good for the country, but that crop has depleted the soil and it’s time for a rotation. Not necessarily a Democrat, because I can’t even think of one I’d vote for, but I’d like to see a whipsmart intellectual Republican like Gingrich take office. Indeed, I’m so convinced that we now need a non-slouch President with a genuine sense of history that I can’t think of a single Republican besides Gingrich that I’d support, other than Condee. Maybe Rudy, but he’ll never get nominated and I’m pro-second. Certainly not last-in-his-clas-at-the-academy McCain. And even Condee seems to have become stupid sometimes.

    Basically I’m fed up with the way this President opts out of anything that smacks of specifics or adaptation, as though being statically rigid is some sort of virtue. I think of him as the Corvair of Presidents. It’ll get you there, but you’ll end up on the side of the road or in the garage alot. And Allen would be the same deal. I’m also sick and tired of the Bush inside crowd elbowing geniunely competent conservatives out of the way with their poorly considered and sparingly-rehearsed-and-defended ideas. I mean, if you asked for salad from those guys you’d get an uncooked gourd. Well, you know… close enough for gummint work. But we’re at war, and I think we need more.

  7. A side point:
    The first from Sullivan’s blog. A good reason to be against Bush, regardless of how well he is leading us against the Islamofascists. (Which happens to be poorly, but that is another point).

    QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist,” – Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943, describing what is now legal and constitutional in the United States, under president Bush.

    Then from Slate:

    Finally, the WP notices another high-quality response from Miers’ questionnaire:

    In describing one matter on the Dallas City Council, Miers referred to “the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause” as it relates to the Voting Rights Act.

    “There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago.

    So on the issue of Miers, we have a person who lets MORE THAN ONE law license lapse, and now is shown to have a poor understanding of the EPC.
    Good enough to be a municipal judge? Maybe. State level? I’m leaning towards not.
    The Supreme Court? Are you joking?

  8. Why should a nominee be more qualified to be a supreme court justice than to be president?

    Remember, this was a president who made no pretense of being knowledgeable about international affairs, so he brought in Cheney who was international, and what is the main thrust of this administration???? This is not a nominee for a higher office than president. Why the higher standards? You’re confusing w.

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