Fun With Czars

This video is called "Dancing With The Czars". It's from the DNC, so you should be aware that their count of Czars under the Bush Administration includes Czar positions that were held by multiple people over the course of the administration. Still, by honest accounting, Obama still has at least one or two FEWER Czar positions than Bush did.





Now, the last time I posted such a thing, I had one person reply that his problem wasn't with the number of Czars but with the specific people Obama is choosing for his Czar positions.

But I've got several responses to that. First off, that's not what I'm hearing from most people. Glenn Beck is trumpeting not the QUALITY of the Czars, but the QUANTITY, and trying to whip his followers into a froth over the false "fact" that Obama has an unprecedented number of Czars.

Second, we should be surprised that Obama's Czars are going to have liberal tendencies? News flash: he was elected as a direct response to 8 years of conservative rule that the majority of voters did not feel made this country stronger or better. That's why the political pendulum swings... we get tired of one side, then we get tired of the other.

Third, among the things that people tired of in the Bush Administration was people being put into positions of authority that came out of the industries themselves or from the lobbying group for those industries. How many foxes could be put in charge of hen houses before people were going to get tired of chickens mysteriously disappearing? If the only alternative to that is someone whose past is a little bit more socialist than I'd prefer, well, I'll still take actual oversight over what we had recently.

And finally, I'm having a really hard time figuring out the complaints anyway. I've had people send me links about some of these guys, and the complaints seem more often than not to relate to something OTHER than the job the person was chosen for. If I need open-heart surgery, I don't particularly care if the surgeon has a history of speaking out on the opposite side from me on political issues, I only care if he's a damned fine surgeon. But on top of that, there's the whole "boy who cried wolf" syndrome again.

Obama has been in office for 8 months now, and I've lost count of how many people have been tarred as "the most liberal" this or "the most socialist" that. A supreme court nominee who in private was the Right Wing's wet dream, a jurist originally nominated to the bench by a Republican, and significantly further to the right than the Justice she was replacing, and yet they still tried to tar her with the "extreme liberal" brush, so that they could not only get someone who was as far to the right as they could reasonably expect, but still score some cheap political points.

They're STILL humping William Ayers as a terrorist and Obama's best buddy, when in fact everything I've read indicates they hardly knew each other, and Ayers has done a lot of atoning since the 70s.

They're still trying to tell us that health care reform means government telling us when Grandma has to die. They're still trying to tell us that Obama was not born in this country when there's simply no credible evidence to that effect and an overwhelming set of evidence that he was born in Hawaii.

So at this point, I'm afraid another blog post frothing at the digital mouth about how this advisor or that Czar wrote a paper in college supporting one socialist policy or another just doesn't convince me of anything. I just hear the boy crying wolf again and go about my business.

And one last note, by the way: there is no such title in the government as "Czar". It's a shorthand developed by the media for what had previously been known as "policy advisors". One of the first of these "Czars" was the guy in charge of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. That was a bit of a mouthful, and a lot for reporters to type, so they coined the term "drug czar".

And so ultimately, this whole anti-czar crusade has the same intellectual honesty as the re-labeling Prisoners of War as "Enemy Combatants", and by the same token, I could (if I were inclined to be just as intellectually dishonest) point out in all truthfulness that the number of officially designated "Enemy Combatants" increased by whatever factor I chose under President Bush, and I could write it in such a way as to imply that Bush created all of these terrorists and other enemies of the state, and was thus the worst President ever. After all, since he created the new designation, there were none before him, and there existed some under his administration. Mathematically, that's an infinite increase, so I could say "more than doubled" or "more than 10 times as many" or "more than a million times as many", whatever number I thought would be large enough to scare people but small enough to sound credible, and I wouldn't be lying.

If worded carefully, such an argument could be made without ever making any statement which was false, but yet the overall impression given would be a blatant falsehood: That President Bush was somehow responsible for the creation of all of these "Enemy Combatants", rather than simply for their labeling.

The same is true here. If you look at what they ARE, instead of what they are CALLED, these "czar" policy advisors have existed since before anyone alive today was born.

Then again, I'm not sure why I'm still ranting. Those who are going to get anything out of this probably already realize what I'm saying, and those who happily swallow every implied smear against Obama's character will most assuredly either have stopped reading long since (having convinced themselves that I'm just another lying liberal) or have already started to rationalize away the things I've said in favor of some bit of spin or other they've heard that they think disproves what I've said.