Ron Suskind

Like the rest of us, Barak Obama had virtually no understanding of how or why Wall Street had torpedoed the US economy as he rounded into the final months of his 2008 Presidential campaign.

I write these words even as Donald Trump’s Presidency is rocked by yet new revelations that he is an incompetent President of the United States, when a member of his own administration has anonymously written an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times claiming that his top officials regularly remove sensitive papers from his desk, “slow-walk” his orders, and have to re-explain the simplest of security matters to him.

Americans have a right to expect better from Trump, but how much better?

In Confidence Men we learn that Obama’s economics advisors “re-litigated” Obama’s decisions, “slow-walked” the ones they didn’t like, and flat out ignored others.

But even Obama was not the first.

The US Intelligence Community flat out hid an intelligence assessment from George Bush out of fears that the information would lead Bush and Vice-President Cheney to declare yet another war in the Middle East.

General Westmoreland fed Lyndon Johnson terrible advice and progress reports about the war in Vietnam. But Johnson largely accepted them.

John Kennedy completely bungled the Vienna Summit with Nikita Kruschev.

President Wilson suffered such serious strokes that his wife made all Presidential decisions for the last two years of his presidency.

President Grant was tricked into helping Jay Gould’s manipulation of gold prices before that, and the list of Presidential losers goes on and on.

What exactly should Americans expect of their President and is the office?

Ostentibly the office was designed to administer the fledgling US government, act on the laws passed by Congress, and give the armed forces a single voice to obey.

But from the beginning, the President has been charged with delegating responsibility to paid officers, and often officers paid on a fee-for-service model that encouraged terrific corruption. And they have “slow-walked” reforms to that system ever since.

People who mourn the loss of professionalism in government forget the alienation that accompanied the professional cadres of American government officials. They believed the bureaucracy sclerotic, the decisions divorced from the “real” needs of the people.

Clearly, government is a work in process. If Americans have anything to worry about it’s that their constitution not pre-empt changing circumstances. And if Americans have anything to fear from their Republican leaders its that they ignore global problems out what they say are threats to their sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a useful fiction for vested interests.

Climate change is not a negotiable outcome.… (mer)

5819. The Way of the World A Story of Truth and Hoppe in an Age of Extremism, by Ron Suskind (read 26 2023) This was published in 2008 and should have been read then. It is a devastating account of the war against Iraq and how we were lied to in order to get into it. I have long deprecated George W. Bush and his minions for that war and this book reinforces my views on Bush and that war. There is a lot in the book reinforcing what I felt in the years of that event. but the book has much seemingly little to do with the events of that war. So the early part of the book was a drag. And we of course have an even worse former Republican president to deprecate now.… (mer)

What is most impressive about A Hope in the Unseen is Suskind's ability to turn hard journalism into a compelling narrative that reads like fiction but is faithful to the truths of his subjects' lives. I am a high school teacher who sees students who struggle with the same issues of race and class and what it means to try to break out of the rigid and defeating expectations set by the community and society. It is Cedric's strength of character and refusal to cede his morals to those around him which makes him a role model for our age.… (mer)