The American Century of Bullying

Maybe there's something about the opening years of a new century that lends itself to maniacal behavior by whoever's in the White House. No, that doesn't explain the maniacal behavior the US of A committed under Wilson, FDR, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and assorted others ....

But Thomas DiLorenzo has an intriguing take on an apparently intriguing new book by Jim Powell called Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy. The review is called "Bully Boy: The Neocons' Favorite President." Both the article and the book revisit the legacy of the president Mark Twain called "clearly insane."

Teddy Roosevelt became president by first serving as William McKinley’s vice president and succeeding him after he was assassinated. One of his first proclamations was that the Filipinos "must be made to realize ... that we are the masters."

That blunt language of Americans as the master race reflected the thinking behind Teddy's status as, DiLorenzo writes, the president who "first declared that the U.S. should act as the world’s policeman, a dramatic contrast to George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s policy of commercial relations with all nations and entangling alliances with none." The result, of course, has been a century of miscellaneous misadventures abroad that have little to do with protecting our borders. "Here you have the principal reason why the neocons are just wild about Teddy."

On another front, James Leroy Wilson has a can't-miss fable about how governments become tyrants over at The Partial Observer.