The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    ¨He´s a good guy¨

    The President to the Director

    ¨I hope you  can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go..He

    Is a good  guy¨


    Take but degree ( the law*) away, untune that string  ,

    and hark  what discord follows! Each thing meets

    In mere oppugnancy . The bounded waters

    Should lift  their bosoms higher than the shores,

    And make a sop of all this solid globe.

    Strength should be lord of imbecility

    And the rude son should strike his father dead.

    Force should be right , or rather  right and wrong

    Between whose endless jar justice resides,

    Should  lose their names and so should justice too.

    Then everything includes itself in power,

    Power into will, will into appetite

    And appetite , a universal wolf,

    So doubly seconded with will  and power,

    Must make perforce a universal prey

    And last eat up himself.

    *Flavius' insert

    Comments

    Oh yeah, and being lawful

    W. Shakespeare : ¨Troilus and Cressida¨. Act 1, sc iii. Ulysses speaking.


    On the BBC news hour at 9AM EDT yesterday a ¨former member of the Reagan and Bush ¨ justice departments¨, plausible , self assured  explained that Trump´s attempt to intercede with Comey on Flynn´s was OK because:

    1. it´s appropriate for a President  to provide ¨guidance¨ to his subordinates, and

    2. the country should be run by those who were elected- we´re not an Administrative State.

    #1 - the soft ball argument. The kindly old inhabitant of the White House should be able to lead  the folks lower down.

    #2- no more Mr. Nice Guy - the current fav  in the right wing jargon sweepstakes. You may think that the person  mailing out the social security checks, or the air traffic controllers, or the one in the guard house at  a National Park are sort of your employees. Silly you! Thatś  actually the  fearsome  Administrative State up to its nefarious work. Next thing you know they'll start requiring pure milk. And clean air.

    Underlying  that capitalized term  is the Reagan pronouncement  that  the Government itself is the problem. No Government , no problem. So why not make Ayn Rand disciple  Greenspan Chairman of the Fed?  He´ll cut back those damn regulations and when he leaves the Fed in 2006 there'll be nothing for his successor  to do.

    As long as he doesn ´t  mind a world wide financial crisis.

    I shouldn´t waste your time and mine vanquishing this paper tiger. When things work, they do so because

    someone has made them work.

    What the assorted think tanks label ¨The Administrative State¨ is just  normal  people getting on with their lives