I Don't Think I Can Teach This, But Lots of Truth

[Annie]

I do wish Bush would stick with WOT:

http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2006/03/the_two_branche.html

March 30, 2006
The Two Branches of Government
Civics 101
Hatched by Dafydd

Forget it.

Just forget everything. Forget everything They ever taught you -- it's garbage anyway.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you learned; I learned it too. There are three branches of federal government, not two:

1. Excutive
2. Legislative
3. Dictatorial

But those are just the branches of the temporary government, the elected/appointed wing. There is another wing of the government... the permanent government. And that comprises only two branches:

* The State branch
* The Defense branch

The permanent (or "bureaucratic") wing of government prevails from Congress to Congress and across all administrations. It never disappears; new members are simply assimilated, Borg-like, into the massmind. Old members are sloughed off like a snake shedding its skin to expose the bright, pink, new skin beneath... which in mere hours looks just like the old skin (and believe me, thisssss is sssomething I have sssssssstudied.)

In each administration, one or the other branch of the permanent government is ascendant. You can always tell which branch by which secretary is stronger -- the Secretary of Talkfare or the Secretary of Warfare:

*

During the Bush-43 administration, Defense is on the rise. Clearly Rumsfeld trumps Rice, just as he trumped Powell. The vice president is a former secretary of Defense, and the president defers to the generals on all war-related issues. Even State is the former National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

You can also tell because the Central Intelligence Agency -- a creature of the State Department (see below) -- is on the warpath against the president.

*

During Clinton, State was on top. Does anybody even remember who Clinton's three Secretaries of Defense were? I think it was Bill Cohen and a couple of other guys. Something to do with skiing... who was that?

But everybody remembers Madeleine Albright -- "Madam" -- and Warren Christopher (often confused with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones). They ran foreign policy; they ran domestic policy; they even ran Clinton's wars.

* And George H.W. Bush was a total State Department guy, through his longtime association with the CIA and his connections with an earlier State-Department administration, the Nixon/Ford-Ford/Rockefeller administration... is it even possible to get more "State" than Nelson Rockefeller? That was such a State administration -- two diplomacy nuts as president and Hammerin' Hank Kissinger bridging between them -- as was Bush-41, that one could almost see the heavy, heavy Defense orientation of the current presidency as the Revenge of the Jilted Defense Secretaries: Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

* Reagan was purely a Defense-driven presidency, just as the current one. His Secretaries of State (Haig and Schultz) were strong capable men... but it was the late, great Cap Weinberger who ran policy, with the first campaign being run by Reagan's favorite advisor, William Casey.

Casey was an odd duck: he ran the CIA, so you would think he leaned towards State. But in fact, he was an old OSS man... and the OSS -- often wrongly called the CIA's predecessor -- was run by War, not by State.

In fact, the creation of the CIA via the National Security Act of 1947 was a triumph of State over War; World War II was over, and Harry Truman was president. The old OSS of "Wild Bill" Donovan had been dissolved two years earlier and played little role in the new agency; the Company was always oriented towards playing the "Great Game" during the Cold War, diplomacy under official cover. They even primarily operate out of embassies!

It's maneuver and counter-maneuver, spy vs. spy, best exemplified by the moral ambiguity and relativity of John le Carré's writings from the 1960s and 1970s (contrast them with Ian Flemming's James Bond series).

State presidents are usually caretakers, while Defense presidents are the only ones that get anything done. So it's no surprise that Clinton spent eight years diddling the interns, while Bush has spent five years overthrowing oppressive dictatorships, destroying giant, transnational terrorist groups, and bringing the country out of the recession left him by his predecessor.

* I think Roosevelt-32 was an exception to the rule: he seems to have made nearly every major decision himself, and neither his various Secretaries of State nor of War seem to have made much of an impression. Maybe one of each -- Cordell Hull (State until nearly the end) and Henry Stimson (the WWII War Secretary) -- are at least noticed and remembered; but everything from the New Deal to Yalta was run right out of the Oval Office.

During George W. Bush's Defense presidency, State's stalking horse, the CIA, has been doing everything possible to unseat him. During Clinton's State presidency, the Pentagon despised him.

So it goes.

A correct understanding of the vicissitudes of the permanent wing of the federal government explains absolutely everything that has ever puzzled you about American federal politics. If it doesn't... then you haven't understood it correctly.

 

[CrimsonWhite]

Makes alot of sense. Would make a great research topic for CivPro. My professor would hate it though.