Before we begin, I’d just like to point out that Noons does a great job in the comments on the original thread on this topic.

David quotes a section K. Roy Garcia ’08’s little WSO rant below. I think he quotes it out of context, so I’m going to reproduce the whole thing so readers can judge for themselves. Cross the flip if you’re interested. Personally, I think the rant is pure attention-seeking with a touch of insane-o, and the WSO regulars (full disclosure: I’m one of them) are right to be unimpressed.

Roy’s full post:

The other day I read an op-ed by Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times which condemned both conservatives and liberals for enganging in behavior that they often accused the other of exhibiting.

Let me put it like this. In the 1930s Upton Sinclair of The Jungle fame wrote a short story entitled “It Can’t Happen Here” in which he outlined a fictional account of the rise of fascism in the United States. His fascist president was a charming and charismatic figure who used a national crisis to assume nearly dictatorial powers. Supposedly Sinclair was condemning big business and the religious fanatics who he feared might seize control of the country in the wake of the Great Depression.

So who did Upton support for president? FDR, a charismatic and charming man who used the Great Depression to assume nearly dictatorial powers. Admittedly FDR may have used his power for good, since nearly one-third of the work force was unemployed and many US citizens were on the verge of starvation. Even if the New Deal didn’t end the Depression, and that point has been debated by historians and economists to the present day, it seems to have genuinely helped people.

The point isn’t whether or not FDR was a good man but that before him most presidents had been relatively weak and ineffectual. With the exception of unusually demanding and powerful chief executives, like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, presidents had not enjoyed particularly vast powers. The founding fathers (those venerable slave-holders, racists, and genocidal expansionists who were the big business merchants and lawyers of their day) apparently intended the president to be nothing more than a slightly more powerful congressman who would carry out the will of the congress.

Today, George W. Bush is criticized for abusing his presidential powers and blatantly violating the law. Fair enough. But that doesn’t make him an aberration. It merely makes him the logical evolution of presidential power. Liberals weren’t complaining when Democratic presidents stretched the meaning of the constitution to justify their welfare, social security, and healthcare programs. Conservatives didn’t complain when Republican preisdents used their expanded powers to overturn all those reforms and rejuvenate the unregulated US free-market. No, liberals and conservatives only complained when the other side abused presidential powers, not when its own side did it.

I don’t know, maybe Democrats or Republicans really are objectively right and one or the other is preaching the Platonic Truth while the other is the anti-Christ. To me it just seems like a bunch of overfed and mentally dulled WASPs are arguing about the best way to continue 231 years of oppression, expansion, annexation, and world domination. All our sorrow will end, I hope, in fifty or one hundred years when Japan, China, the European Union and all the other nations of the world dismember the United States and drive its wasted masses into the oceans to find shelter in their watery graves.

So what’s my point? While I was unloading a truck in the back of a department store, I came upon a massive shipment of Hello Kitty handbags shaped just like the head of said kitty. As I unloaded what must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands from the truck previously mentioned, unpackaged them, and prepared them for the storeroom floor, I reflected on two things. One, they were very cute and adorable. Two, they represented a cornicopia of political, economic, and sociological facts. These ridiculous pieces of crap were licensed merchandise from Japan, manufactured in China with raw materials from the Third World, and sent to a department store in California to be unpackaged by cheap Mexican labor (that’s me) and sold to idiots with too much money (you?).

And that was when I knew it had become hopeless.

Students respond:

1) You should’ve known it was hopeless when you started reading Jonah Goldberg.
2) Why are you posting your self-serving, faux self-justifying tripe on WSO? This is way past garden-variety trolling, and you can’t expect some kind of vindication in this forum so, uhh, what’s the point?

Nice. I’m glad you think that. Cool.

“2) Why are you posting your self-serving, faux self-justifying tripe on WSO? This is way past garden-variety trolling, and you can’t expect some kind of vindication in this forum so, uhh, what’s the point?”

Truer words haven’t been said. I’ve read it and found more inspirational and enlightening material from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

I like how the last paragraph (not including “and that was when…”) has nothing to do with the others. That was fun.