What? What the hell is dude talking about?
Saturday, 26 September 2009???
Is Conor really telling us that loyalty to an abstraction (“the people”) is preferable to loyalty to a person (“the President”)? As a conservative, does he think that the former is even a well-defined concept? Possible given human nature? Desirable?
???
Western civilization, from the ancient Greeks up on through the American experiment and in its imminent future aboard Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise, is (as best I can tell) essentially founded upon a belief that loyalty to ideals—that is, abstractions—should supersede loyalty to people.
(Plus, as one of the commenters on the post points out, working for the president is a job. It’s not more than that, because the whole point of a president is that he is not special. Do I have a responsibility to not write a tell-all about my former bosses—that is what the post that started it is about—because I should be loyal to them? And if I don’t, then why does someone who worked for the president?*)
*Barring, of course, the matter of state secrets and so forth—the publication of which we already have rules in place to prosecute.
