The US is not the Soviet Union. I am reaching my boiling point with this BS: The 5 Economic "Big Lies" The Government Is Telling You.
No doubt these lies are "for my own good," just like the Obamacare lies. I am sick of an overly-powerful federal government, and sick of the fawning respect it gets from the media. It disgusts me, this culture of branding and pop-culture, high-school, leg-tingling nonsense which has invaded government.
From a good post on Washington DC and it's over-importance and self-importance, Fifty Years after Dallas - In a TV cult like Kennedy’s, there is more than a whiff of Roman decadence.
The real difficulty is that the presidency has come to occupy too large a place in our individual psyches, even as the federal nation-state over which the president presides has come to occupy too large a place in our individual lives. The imperial presidency that had its beginnings in the administrations of the first Roosevelt and Wilson has grown up with the imperial state, a noxious weed that is only too likely to culminate in a kind of Caesarian first magistracy, an office very different from the one the Founders envisioned when they drafted the second article of the Constitution.
As the federal government grows ever more potent, local and regional culture diminish apace; we are left only with national power and the national sanctities. Kennedy, who made the slenderest of marks on the policy of the nation, left the greatest impression on its imaginative life. He had, indeed, an eye for the enchanting symbol. He approved the peculiar logo that is to this day blazoned on the presidential aircraft; he conceived the Medal of Freedom; he laid down the protocols for the pageantry of the modern state visit. What is more, he chose for his mate a brunette of excellent taste who turned the dowdy White House into the most stylish of 20th-century courts, and selected for his (most notable) concubine a platinum blonde who continues to haunt that dream-vision of an America in which Huck Finn, Abe Lincoln, and Betsy Ross (or some such mythical company) are forever laughing and swapping yarns on a raft on the Mississippi.
It is, alas, a spurious dream.
JFK was not much as a president, but he was a pre-Beatles pop-idol for the gals, and he enchanted the media. The only good thing about him was his basic conservatism. Rich and handsome, with good, expensive speech-writers. So what?
