by Smitty
Sandy Goodman at the Puffington Host generates a truly useful idiocy in attacking another useful idiot, David Brooks, for his PBS NewsHour appearance Friday night.
At issue is whether the Joe Barton apology can be seen as standing up for the rule of law.
Goodman:
Those laws, Brooks reminded us, protect the unpopular and “even people who do bad things,” besides forcing “the bad and the negligent “to pay and compensate those who were damaged.” But, he added, what the president did “when he very publicly and very brutally strong-armed BP into setting aside this $20 billion [in an escrow account to pay for damages] is, he went around those laws,” causing Brooks to worry about “the erosion of the rule of law.”
Unsurprisingly, Mark Shields, the NewsHour’s liberal commentator who appears alongside Brooks, disagreed. Shields detected no brutality. Further, he pointed out that BP had long ago agreed to pay for all the damages. Most important for this discussion, Shields observed that BP could have gone “the legal due process route” and “lawyered up” to fight Obama’s escrow fund had it chosen to do so.
Really? Really? Say, Gerald Walpin legal due process? The famous Eric Holder Department OJ?
The current crisis is Constitutional, economic, and legal. The difference between our President and Hugo Chavez doesn’t seem to extend much beyond accent. Mark Shields could be more usefully replaced with Robert Shields, at least until his prescription is improved.
Back to Goodman:
Which is, of course, absolutely true, and a point I would like to expand on. May I remind people of a couple of times in the last century, not necessarily the only ones, when presidents have acted to force businesses to do what they thought was best for the country during national emergencies, and that businesses have fought back – and sometimes won — by using the very law that young David Brooks, who was not around then, fears is now being so brutally eroded by a strong-arming Obama.
For example, what American who was old enough to look at pictures in 1944 can ever forget one of the most memorable photographs of that year in the midst of World War II. It showed two American soldiers bodily carrying a defiant Sewell Avery, one of the nation’s business leaders, out of his office like a sack of potatoes. Avery was chairman of Montgomery Ward, then one of America’s largest retail companies. He was carried out after he defied an order by the War Labor Board to renew a union contract. Although Avery left shouting “to hell with the government,” the Commerce Department, under orders from President Roosevelt, took over the company and ran it for more than a year. Montgomery Ward contested the action in court but lost. However, the rule of law, far from being eroded, was tested and came out a winner.
First, way to avoid mentioning the Japanese Internment Camps in selecting an example to support Federal thuggery. Second of all, Sewell Avery is an example of home-grown fascism that all Americans should know.
Avery defied Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by refusing to pay $30,000, as prescribed by the National Recovery Act. Despite this defiance, his vice president at Montgomery Ward (Frank Folsom) was appointed to FDR’s National Defense Advisory Commission (1940-1941). During World War II, Avery would not comply with government orders to allow unionization efforts. As a result, National Guardsmen carried him from his office in 1944. “To hell with the government,” he blurted out at the Attorney General, “You… New Dealer!”
Avery’s opposition to union-laws are best summed up in his own words, when asked what he intended to do after the government had seized Montgomery Ward. He said: “… the government has been coercing both employers and employees to accept a brand of unionism which in all too many cases is engineered by people who are not employees of the plant…these devices…only appear to make workers free to choose,… are a disguise for leading the nation into a government of dictators.”
Card Check, anyone?
It’s also interesting to see apparent Army regulars carrying Avery out. Was the Governor of Michigan at the time really such a feckless tool? I should expect my own Governor Bob McDonnell to read the troops the Posse Comitatus Act if the troops tried something similar in Virginia.
Let’s give Susan Goodman a Full Whoopi Award for this performance. Understood, the Rule of Law is only cited in Alinsky Rule 4 circumstances against Conservatives. But still, Susan: get stuffed.
Looking over this post, it seems a trifle over-caffeinated. The whole deal was handled in such a genteel fashion. They had all of the details worked out a priori; the 20 minute meeting was merely to put a nice silky bow on the pooch. Maybe I should end on a happy face:
