These are the new Czars, like the Car Czar, the Intergovernmental Czar, or even the new Great Lakes Czar, though what some of these folks actually do is as murky as Lake Michigan in March or an expansive Obama speech in support of the little folks in Iran who are trying to crack open a window of freedom.
But as one wag pointed out to me, maybe they're Tsars. After all, their actual titles have never been officially been spelled out and remain as open to interpretation as their duties. Unlike the Tsars, however, they report only to President Obama, their supreme leader, or, in German, their Fuehrer.
But looking back in time so we don't repeat what's already happened before and by doing so we find out we really did do, let's look at Germany in 1938 and cast a brief look at an excellent new book by Adam Tooze, titled, "
The Wages of Destruction" (Penguin Group, NY, NY, 2006), which describes a topsy-turvy world of economics dangerously close to the one we're living in.
Being fervidly anti-communist and anti-Russian in general, the Nazi administration refused to use the word Czar, Tsar, or Zar (German), and instead used the common German word Bevollmachtiger, or plenipotentiary. And man, in the Nazi hierarchy, there were a whole lot of plenipotentiaries and Bevollmachtigers running around and bumping into each other; for labor, armaments, construction, aircraft manufacture, etc.
And being a Nazi plenipotentiary had its perks, too. The big Mercedes. The brown uniforms with the outlandishly large eagles on the caps and the red and gold gizmos running up the sleeves, set off by the big brass buttons. Big, highly polished, chrome leather riding boots, and maybe a whip or two. And if you were lucky enough to be seconded to the Allgemeine SS, you could do it all up in black and silver with a few Death's Heads here and there, with one on your peaked cap.
Today, being a Democrat Czar may not be as flashy, but you've got the power, the White House pass, the platinum AmEx card, maybe a turbo Carrera, arm candy from Elliot's escort service, with your hopes set on a Ferrari California if Barack can hold on for 8 years, unless he becomes president for life and you can grab that real plenipotentiary title and the black uniform, peaked cap, and perhaps a bully Death's head cuff band and cap piece, because by then he's made it, you've made it, and it won't matter a whit what kind of togs you roll on in the morning. But I digress.
So, Mr. Tooze explains that Nazi Germany in 1938 featured the following happenings on just page 291:
//...Goering announced that the entire population was to be registered in a national card index administered by SS Police Chief Kurt Daluege. This was to allow the labour offices to allocate every man and woman to their most productive location in the national economy.
'The great building projects of the Fuehrer would be carried through because of their importance for morale and psychology.'
All manufacturing plants would be subject to inspection to establish whether they were using labor efficiently.
The automotive industry was to be taken in hand by a special plenipotentiary...
The national railway system... creaking under the strain... was to benefit from a multi-billion Reichsmark investment programme.
Goering raised the possibility that the entire German population would be asked to make a 'Thanksgiving Sacrifice' in the form of a surrender of wealth.
On 15 November Colonel Adolf von Schell was appointed General Plenipotentiary for motor vehicles.
You know, if you change some names, and toss out plenipotentiary and toss in czar, the 1938 headlines in the Berliner Tageblatt can pretty much mirror those in today's Wall Street Journal.
Of course the Grey Lady, the New York Times, most likely damned the economic program from 1938 because it smacked of state sponsored 'fascism'; while today this same left liberal newspaper praises our current strong man with seemingly endless syrupy encomiums and obsequious blandishments on a scale never before printed, because President Obama is well on the way toward completing a similar, if not the exact, state controlled economic program today.
And if you substitute the cherubic faces, toothy grins, and blank stares of Dick Turban, Chris Dodd, and Harry Reid for similarly red nosed, rosy cheeked, and dull stares of the paladins who always voted yes for President Hermann Goering in the Reichstag, you'll find that similar "yes-man" mind-set. The utter disdain for each one's constitution is the same. The only differences are the Brown Shirts, ties, slacks, daggers on the Sam Browne belts, and polished boots v. the Brooks Brothers suit ensembles with the rep ties that are all the rage today.
Only the names have been changed.
As President Obama routinely exceeds the US Constitution and carves a new country out of the wreckage he's already wrought, he's brought twenty or so new men and women into this heady mix. They have never been used before and their jobs exist way outside the three branches of government we learned in school - the legislative, executive, and judicial.
