Lileks on "King Kluxer" (a.k.a. Robert Byrd)
When he's good, he's very good, and when he's mad, he's better:
Robert Coot is a crazy old byrd, and for years he’s been a strange, amusing auto-rhetoric dispenser: prop him up, plug him in, and out rolls long bolts of gilded dross. You imagine that a Byrd speech is an occasion for colleagues to use the rest room, file their nails, arrange the pencils on their desk (color, length, hardness) and generally relax until the warm fog is punctured by one of Byrd’s trademark yelps! Every party always has its batty old men. But that’s no excuse for this tripe. After a good deal of jerque de cirque about the historical glory of the Senate, he said the following about the so-called “nuclear option” and the debate over Senate confirmation procedures. (Transcript courtesty Duane, who has additional comments.)
"Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions in modern conditions are carried out with, and not without, not against, the power of the State. The correct order of events was first to secure access to that power of the State, and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality. He never abandoned the cloak of legality. He recognized the enormous, psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made his illegality legal."
No sheet, King Kluxer. Every totalitarian regime uses a cloak of legality. Laws are the means by which behavior is proscribed, and an excess of laws is the best way to codify your control over people. What sets a free society apart from, oh, NAZIS, is having some sort of process to correct the laws, some higher standard against which they can be measured. Like the Constitution, to use the first example that come to mind. The Nazis passed an “Enabling Act” that said, among other things: The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution provided they do not affect the position of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat.
So much for the Constitution. Granted, they had a “cloak of legality,” but legality itself was redefined into “whatever we want is legal,” which makes the very concept meaningless, and makes the analogy as stupid as it is insulting.
Robert Coot is a crazy old byrd, and for years he’s been a strange, amusing auto-rhetoric dispenser: prop him up, plug him in, and out rolls long bolts of gilded dross. You imagine that a Byrd speech is an occasion for colleagues to use the rest room, file their nails, arrange the pencils on their desk (color, length, hardness) and generally relax until the warm fog is punctured by one of Byrd’s trademark yelps! Every party always has its batty old men. But that’s no excuse for this tripe. After a good deal of jerque de cirque about the historical glory of the Senate, he said the following about the so-called “nuclear option” and the debate over Senate confirmation procedures. (Transcript courtesty Duane, who has additional comments.)
"Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions in modern conditions are carried out with, and not without, not against, the power of the State. The correct order of events was first to secure access to that power of the State, and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality. He never abandoned the cloak of legality. He recognized the enormous, psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made his illegality legal."
No sheet, King Kluxer. Every totalitarian regime uses a cloak of legality. Laws are the means by which behavior is proscribed, and an excess of laws is the best way to codify your control over people. What sets a free society apart from, oh, NAZIS, is having some sort of process to correct the laws, some higher standard against which they can be measured. Like the Constitution, to use the first example that come to mind. The Nazis passed an “Enabling Act” that said, among other things: The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution provided they do not affect the position of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat.
So much for the Constitution. Granted, they had a “cloak of legality,” but legality itself was redefined into “whatever we want is legal,” which makes the very concept meaningless, and makes the analogy as stupid as it is insulting.
posted by Kate Marie | 11:29 PM | Permalink
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2 comments
2 Comments:
I still love this Dennis Miller whack at King Kluxer:
"And you know something, if Robert Byrd were your grandfather and he came to Thanksgiving dinner and went off on one of these demented screeds, everybody would sit there smiling at him, and as soon as he left the room, somebody'd say, 'Hey, what the hell are we gonna do about grandpa?'"
My favoite Robert Byrd story was a speech that I heard him give on the Senate floor. It was back in the days when the battle de jour in the culture wars was the adolescent toilet humor of Bevis and Butthead. The great Sheeted One got up and condemned "Beaver and Buffcoat"! True!!
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