New Book Compliments The Works of Peter Dale Scott

[Peter Lemkin]

I went to Amazon and quickly read through the Index. PDS does not appear nor does Carroll Quigley. There's lot's of references to organizational behavior and "rational action theory." It sounds like it will serve to set the boundary beyond which opinion must not wander. It certainly has a lot of reviews. David Talbot's books, for example, have not. They are beyond the pale. Don't get me wrong; it sounds worth reading, but it will be ultimately very disappointing.

Peter, I will be looking forward to your review.

It is true that Glennon stops well before where Peter Dale Scott ventures; however, I think this still strengthens, especially to the Deep Politically uninformed, the better and 'deeper' arguments of Scott. Most of the public will never read Scott, while this book may be read...and that may pave the way for some to then go on to reading Scott who wouldn't have touched his books otherwise.

The question whether the President could institute a
complete about-face supposes a top-down policy-making model. The
illusion that presidents issue orders and that subordinates simply carry them
out is nurtured in the public imagination by media reports of "Obama's"
policies or decisions or initiatives, by the President's own frequent
references to "my" directives or personnel, and by the Trumanites own
reports that the President himself has "ordered" them to do something. But
true top-down decisions that order fundamental policy shifts are rare.369 The
reality is that when the President issues an "order" to the Trumanites, the
Trumanites themselves normally formulate the order.370 The Trumanites
"cannot be thought of as men who are merely doing their duty. They are the
ones who determine their duty, as well as the duties of those beneath them.
They are not merely following orders: they give the orders."371 They do that
by "entangling"372 the President. This dynamic is an aspect of what one
scholar has called the "deep structure" of the presidency.373 As Theodore
Sorensen put it, "Presidents rarely, if ever, make decisionsparticularly in
foreign affairsin the sense of writing their conclusions on a clean
slate . . . . [T]he basic decisions, which confine their choices, have all too
often been previously made."374

This book is midway between how most people view the US polity and how Peter Dale Scott describes it. It has a lot of interesting information and references and can be used by those of us who can see further and deeper. It also may open the eyes of some others. Agreed, it is not the be all and end all on the subject - and not up to the standards and probing works of Scott. It is complementary, not a replacement. I found it very enlightening, for example, where he detailed the backgrounds of most of the Supreme Court Justices - and just how many were involved in the Deep State decision making before they were selected...all well referenced. And many other things like that.

It is mostly about the Military-Intelligence-National Security apparatus, and leaves out who they work for....something that Scott goes into on a much deeper level. However, I think it has its merits, even if it is somewhat limited in its scope.

He ends the Harvard piece with this sentence:

What form of government
ultimately will emerge from the United States' experiment with double
government is uncertain. The risk is considerable, however, that it will not
be a democracy.