Skip to main content

On Bucks, and Where they Stop

Image result for Janet Reno

On Monday, the day before the US election day, newspapers carried obits of Janet Reno, President William Jefferson Clinton's attorney general.

Apparently she succumbed due to complications of Parkinson's disease. May she rest in peace.

The obits of course all necessarily discussed the US raid on the Branch Davidian compound on April 19, 1993. A mass murder difficult to forget or forgive, but perhaps you dear reader will think that sort of thing too common a consequence of statism for further reflection here.

What I would like to remind you of now, though, out of the long fall-out from that event, was her assertion, apparently aimed at protecting her boss, that "the buck stops here, with me."

It completely reversed the significance of the old Truman sign. After all, the point of the sign on HST's desk saying the buck stops here was developing the then astonishing consequences of the fact that Truman was the President of the United States. And buck-stopping is what being head of an organization accepts. No buck in our system stops with a cabinet member.

I am reminded of a sign my father had on HIS desk at work for years. Dad was a manufacturing process planner at the Pratt & Whitney play in East Hartford. If you don't know what P&W manufactured, or what a process planner does ... never mind for now. The point is the sign.

"The buck doesn't even PAUSE here."

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryNovember 12, 2016 at 7:29 AM

    Christopher, I agree with what you write here, but Reno may have been making a legitimate distinction. The buck may have stopped with Clinton because he hired Reno, and because he delegated the decision-making responsibility regarding the raid to her, but she is claiming to have made the decision without his input.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherNovember 12, 2016 at 8:00 AM

    Well, okay, but the COTUS is pretty clear that one of the central duties of the POTUS is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Either Reno believed she was faithfully executing the laws, or she didn't. In the former case, the buck seems pretty eager to move on the WJC's desk. In the latter case ... she's be confessing to murder.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more