What I haven’t seen so far is any discussion about how these remarks — both the question and the answer — reveal a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of the proper purpose of government.

It’s not the proper job of the President and Congress to kick ass. It’s the job of the President to enforce the laws and bring violators to justice. If the laws are serving us badly, then it’s time to work to improve the laws and/or the enforcement mechanism.

I suppose some might say the “kick ass” remark is just a way of saying the same thing. But even if it were, which is doubtful given the history of this administration, it’s a bad way to say it became it promotes the idea of vigilante justice, of working outside the law.

We see this bad attitude in newspaper articles that, instead of informing us about regulatory mechanisms being proposed for, say, the banking industry, instead talk about whether or not the new laws are “tough.” But the question of whether they are tough distracts attention from the question of whether they are effective, predictable, and enforceable in a fair, corruption-free manner.

No, this isn’t the American ruling class trying to maintain its hegemony against the rise of tea party activism. These are Russian rulers who are afraid of motorists who are protesting against special road privileges for VIPs.

Just the same, the Russian government could use the services of our Bill Clinton. He knows how to deal with these types of people, if you know what I mean.

His step to the national stage brought police surveillance and a mix of pressure and courtship by officials worried that his horn-honking activism might ignite broader unrest. He recalls the swift reaction when a participant on his group’s online forum suggested setting a car on fire in Red Square. Within minutes, Mr. Kanayev was summoned to Criminal Police headquarters. “It was just a joke,” he says he told his interrogators.

A Kremlin political operative approached, he says, and promised time on state-run television if he would stop the caravans. Another official, Sergey Shishkarev, who heads parliament’s transport committee, says he has offered to shape some of Mr. Kanayev’s ideas on tax and safety issues into legislation but warned the activist “to work without fanaticism.”

WSJ link here

That must be what he meant back in 2005 when he said, “We need to rise above the “ends justify the means” mentality.”

The truly amazing part is how it managed to put out so many words without once mentioning Barak Obama’s actions in the direction of totalitarianism. It mentions Bush & Cheney quite a bit, and gives a fairly balanced account of what they did and didn’t do in the totalitarian direction. Richard Nixon gets a mention. But there is not a word about Barak Obama’s new detention policies that go farther than Bush’s ever did, or his politicization of the Justice Department, or his takeovers and attempted takeovers of various sectors of our economy, or his intolerance of dissenting viewpoints.

How could anyone who is not a partisan hack write such an otherwise balanced account without mentioning our current President, I wondered.

Then I got to thinking that it’s not so unusual after all. Slate is well known as a leftwing magazine. Young leftwingers are not very tolerant these days. If Levin wants to be able to be allowed to work, breed, and not have others treat him like a pariah, it’s probably not something he dares to talk about directly. He needs to talk in parables and circumlocutions to get his point across.

It’s not unlike in movies made in Soviet Russia. In those I’ve seen there is (to me, at least) a surprising amount of social commentary that would probably not have got past the censors if they had discussed the topics directly. So a comedy like Kin-Dza-Dza could be criticial of a government infested with bribe-takers and abusers of power — if the action took place on another planet.

That movie is probably not the greatest example, because Kin-Dza-Dza was released in 1986 when the Soviet Union was already much more open than it had been previously. But I happen to have the movie handy, including the above part where our heroes have just reached the point when they cannot take it anymore and have decided to fight back, starting by taking down the police officer who is helping himself to bribes.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is probably a better example. It came out in 1972, a very different time, and it, too, got by with a lot by putting the setting on another planet. That way any messages wouldn’t strike too close to home.

Another example is in the 1973 TV series that Myra and I are currently watching: “Seventeen Moments in Spring”, which takes place in Nazi Germany. The English subtitles for the narrator for Göring’s words at the point of the above screenshot say, “Our concentration camps are humane instruments to save the enemies of national-socialism. If we don’t put them in camps, there will be a mob law. In such way, they’ll be completely reformed and realize our rightness”. Even in 1973 it was probably easier and more effective to talk about that than about the GULAG system of corrective labor from the same World War II period, which had very similar methods and purposes.

I’m not sure if the movie was really intended as social commentary, though. So far what I’ve seen of it is a very patriotic movie that doesn’t seem to be getting in digs at problems that include the producers’ own country. But I wonder if a viewer, perhaps living in the same household with former inmates from the GULAG, could help but think about how their own country once did such things, too.

This sort of indirect system of social commentary is of course not just a feature of Soviet Russia. Authors and producers in other countries have sometimes had to approach issues indirectly, too. And if you consider the type of people who usually read Slate, it’s probably something that happens in our country, too. The Josh Levin article may very well be an example.

Late note:  Also cross-posted to Kino Reticulator

The problem is, it gives people the idea that corruption is illegal. If corruption was illegal, then Rahm Emanuel would be in the slammer for trying to give out federal stimulus funds only on condition that recipients speak favorably about the stimulus program. Of course Emanuel should lose his job over that, but I’m not sure it’s something for the criminal courts.

The first African-American president came to the continent of his father to exhort Africans on Saturday to rid themselves of corruption, embrace democracy and move from the grand, often violent, struggles of liberation and tribalism to the quieter, more potent movement of stability and economic growth.

URL here.

But now we see that some projects truly are shovel ready.

Last night the scandal involving the firing of federal watchdog Gerald Walpin made it onto the front page of Google News, though not to the very top. In the wee hours of the morning you could find it, not on the front page, but pretty high up if you clicked on U.S. news. Around 9 a.m. EDT it was 19th on U.S. news, and now it’s not there at all. It looks like the news media have been burying it as fast as possible.

There you have it. That story was shovel ready.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A White House lawyer says President Barack Obama fired the watchdog for federal AmeriCorps programs because he was “unduly disruptive” and engaged in “trouble and inappropriate conduct.”

And here I thought it was the job of watchdogs to be disruptive.

Back when Rod Blagojevich was in the news, it reminded people that President Obama had come out of the corrupt Chicago political machine. But there were those who pointed out that President Truman came out of the corrupt Pendergast machine, but had managed to stay clean himself. So why couldn’t Obama do the same?

I don’t have the answer as to why he couldn’t, but with the handling of Gerald Walpin it has become apparent that Barak Obama is no Harry Truman.

WSJ editorial here.

We can all assume that what Tom Lauria said is true. The Obama administration threatened Perella Weinberg, saying it would use “the full force of the White House press corps [to] destroy it’s reputation” if it resisted the government’s plan to abrogate their status as preferred creditors.

Robert Gibbs denied that the White House put that kind of pressure on Perella Weinberg, but nobody believes that. Obama’s defenders in the blogosphere are instead defending the right of Obama to bash corporations.

Some professional journalists are peddling the line that Perella Weinberg itself denied it. But there is no evidence of such a denial. Yes, there is a Reuters article with the headline, “Perella denies White House threat over Chrysler.” But if you read the article, you find out that what Perella Weinberg did was contradict the idea that it succumbed to White House pressure. At that point it says it realized its interests were better served by going along with the White House plan. That of course is not a denial that the threat was made exactly as Lauria described it.

Others are doing a good job of describing the many offenses against our legal system in what the Obama administration is doing here. I presume some of them will someday be featured in a bill of impeachment.

But the most chilling aspect of this has not been discussed. That is that the White House threatened to use the press corps as its agent of destruction.

And there hasn’t been a word of outcry from the nation’s press. Shouldn’t it be howling against Lauria, demanding that he retract his slander. Shouldn’t they try to protect their reputation, however tarnished?

About the best the news media have done, in some cases, is to omit the part of the accusation that involves them. For example, Neil King Jr. and Jeffrey McCracken of the Wall Street Journal simply say that Tom Lauria “accused the White House of threatening to destroy the reputation of Perella Weinberg.” They don’t mention the press’s alleged role in this.

Yes, it’s a vindication for those of us who have accused the nation’s press of losing its objectivity and being in the tank for Obama. But our country would be in a healthier state if the press still thought it desirable to deny it.

George W. Bush asserted the right to put “enemy combatants” in detention camps without even charging them with a crime.

That was quite a power grab on his part, but now Barak Obama has gone him one step better. He asserts the right to put people in camps even if they aren’t enemy combatants. A lot more people will fit his definition of who can be locked up than fit GWB’s definition.

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Importantly, the filing asserts that the president has the right to continue to seize individuals it deems to be members or “substantial” supporters of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It does not define what is meant by “substantial,” but suggests that the executive branch alone will determine what constitutes membership in, or support of, these organizations. The New York Times called this definition “not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”

The administration asserts its right to interpret ambiguously even its own vague description of those to be seized. According to the Justice Department, “the particular facts and circumstances justifying detention will vary from case to case.” US Attorney General Eric Holder indicated that the legal status of the inmates will remain in limbo, referring in a statement to “developing a new policy to govern detainees.”