Getting Mark Twain Right: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 113-116

Mark Twain is one of the best American writers in our nation's history. It's really hard to beat his sarcasm and wit, especially for the time he was writing. He's also one of those people in history that gets misquoted quite frequently, so when I saw a Twain quote to open chapter 5 I immediately went to the internet to find out the real quote. Here is the quote as Cooper presents it, 

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." 

The line, presented without attribution, is correct. Cooper claims Twain wrote this in 1885, but that's an error--Twain wrote the book the line in "Following the Equator" as a follow-up to a trip he took in 1895. The book was first published in 1897. Even in the book, its presence is abrupt. It opens a chapter that discusses Twain's encounter with the fauna of Australia. It's about as non sequitur as one can get, even for Twain this is strange. 

It fits in with the chapter in Cooper's book where he is going to discuss the end of the USA and the beginning of the New World Order. This is a strange topic because hasn't he already done this in every chapter except the first? 

Omni-conspiracy theorists like Bill Cooper do not have consistent worldviews. Cooper has claimed that a secret, possibly alien, force had conquered the entire world thousands of years ago. Then, as a result of their dominion, they created the world through the events that we read about in history books. At some point, this resulted in creating the United States. There is no way around it. Even an amateur historian would know that the American Revolution was basically a proxy war between the UK and France. The secret masters of the world did not let France fund the Revolutionaries without permission. The entire thing is part of the plan. When people like Cooper say "Goodbye USA" they can only mean that part of the plan is over and a new part is beginning. A knight in chess is always subject to the whim of the player, and the existence of the US--by Cooper's own reckoning--is only part of the whim of the secret masters. 

Cooper believes that Congress is full of criminals but this is a cliche unless he starts naming crimes. The only crime he can name is that they don't represent the people, "It is paradoxical that the government body most representative of the American citizen is the one that has been the most easily subverted. Through PACs, payoffs, pork-barrel politics, professional politicians, Congressmen who are members of secret societies and through greed and fear, our Representatives and Senators quit representing us long ago.."

Cooper has at least a couple legitimate griefs here. Yes PAC contributions are a problem, as are bribery and what he calls professional politicians. The problem is obvious: funding. PACs (Political Action Committee) and "payoffs" or only effective because they donate to campaigns and represent a too influential thumb on the scale. Cooper is writing before the decision in Citizens United which removed the limits on how much can be spent; so I wonder how much he would have written about that today or if he would have descended into right-wing lunacy like so many other conspiracy theorists. 

Another problem he seems to have is that he doesn't quite get how legislation gets made. He asks, "How is that our Legislature has allowed and at time encouraged the Executive Branch to write law?

This is a good question if that's what actually happens. He's confusing an expression, the "Biden infrastructure law," with the reality of the law itself. Biden didn't write the law, a bunch of people working for the Democratic party, Congress, and the Biden Administration wrote a law; because they are on the same team. The executive branch signs it into law, but the entire idea is that the legislature can prevent it if they feel the need to. In Cooper's ideal world, I suppose, he wants Congress and the president to be "black-boxed" so that the president only sees the law when/if it passes Congress. That may be a feasible approach, but I don't think it is practical that people with the same ideas and the same goals wouldn't work together. 

However, Cooper also brings up another actual problem--the power creep of the executive branch. He laments that the president effectively imposes laws through the use of Executive Orders, National Security memos, etc. 

Ok, this isn't a bad criticism but it fails to understand what these are. An executive order is an order over the agencies and departments of the government that is within the executive branch's oversight. If the president wants the FBI to de-prioritize a certain type of crime (like felony possession of a drug) he can issue a directive to the Justice Department. President Kennedy, in another example, attempted to desegregate the South by issuing an executive order that all federal contractors working with the Executive branch take affirmative action (this is where the phrase comes from) by hiring a diversity of individuals or they would lose their contracts. This is a problem because the government has grown quite a bit and the presidential power is greatly expanded since the 1990s. 

Cooper claims that this began under president Bush in 1990 with the passage of the "Senate Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991. Specifically, because of "tide VII, S.B. 2834." 

First, he means "title" and not "tide." He also means VI because there is no VII. VII is a problem, it allows the president to issue orders for covert action provided the president feels that the action will support the foreign policies of the United States. There are a few caveats to this: the first is that it has to be done in writing, is not retroactive, specifies who is going to be conducting it (and whether they are subject to US law), and that there is no violation of the Constitution. The bill was in response to the Iran-Contra affair where Reagan authorized the sale of weapons to Iran in order to fund operations in South America. The bill places enough limits on the president that Reagan's actions could not be repeated without a paper trail but the idea that the president has the sole determination of whether an action is to support American foreign policy seems to give the office more of a free hand than I would like. It does not, as Cooper claims, make Bush (or any president) king of America. 

Cooper's complaints in this section are all, sort of valid. It's hard to write that sentence because he misunderstands so much; but if you want to talk about runaway executive authority or private interests influencing policy, I agree. Criticisms like this need to be accurate because otherwise, you appear to be a person like Cooper screaming about lizards controlling the FBI. His next complaint concerns National Security Directives, and this is a separate (though related) problem; the only trouble is that Cooper thinks it legitimizes a certain group of people from his UFO days.