To an extent, similarities come down to structural and organizational problems rather than individual preferences or character.
A random, well-meaning person on the street, thrown into the role of president, would likely wind up doing war crimes. Someone experienced comes up and puts a plan on your desk and says they just need you to sign off on an operation, gives you a nightmare scenario about a terrorist attack, you have a million things to do as president and don’t want to make enemies, how skeptically are you really gonna look at that plan?
Back in the 50’s, after Truman created the CIA, Allan Dulles and Winston Churchill tried to convince him to covertly oust Iran’s prime minister. Truman, who had dealt with Mossadegh and saw the Brits act like asshole colonizers during negotiations, told them to get fucked and that the CIA wasn’t supposed to be in the business of overthrowing democratically elected leaders.
But the Eisenhower came in. Iran was way down his list of priorities, the only perspectives he was getting were from Dulles and Churchill, so he basically just said, alright, do whatever you were going to do. And the Iranians got fucked out of their democracy. It’s only gotten worse since then, and nobody can be at expert about everything.
Like, the US struggles to elect people who are not actively malevolent and making the problem worse, and the bar is so fucking low, but the structure around the office of president is so fucked and filled with these absolute ghouls, that until that changes, it hardly matters if the office is occupied by a saint.
And it’s kinda the same story with the papacy. The Catholic Church is fucked on an institutional level. Nice pope, mean pope, whatever, that one individual can only make so much of a difference.
To an extent, similarities come down to structural and organizational problems rather than individual preferences or character.
A random, well-meaning person on the street, thrown into the role of president, would likely wind up doing war crimes. Someone experienced comes up and puts a plan on your desk and says they just need you to sign off on an operation, gives you a nightmare scenario about a terrorist attack, you have a million things to do as president and don’t want to make enemies, how skeptically are you really gonna look at that plan?
Back in the 50’s, after Truman created the CIA, Allan Dulles and Winston Churchill tried to convince him to covertly oust Iran’s prime minister. Truman, who had dealt with Mossadegh and saw the Brits act like asshole colonizers during negotiations, told them to get fucked and that the CIA wasn’t supposed to be in the business of overthrowing democratically elected leaders.
But the Eisenhower came in. Iran was way down his list of priorities, the only perspectives he was getting were from Dulles and Churchill, so he basically just said, alright, do whatever you were going to do. And the Iranians got fucked out of their democracy. It’s only gotten worse since then, and nobody can be at expert about everything.
Like, the US struggles to elect people who are not actively malevolent and making the problem worse, and the bar is so fucking low, but the structure around the office of president is so fucked and filled with these absolute ghouls, that until that changes, it hardly matters if the office is occupied by a saint.
And it’s kinda the same story with the papacy. The Catholic Church is fucked on an institutional level. Nice pope, mean pope, whatever, that one individual can only make so much of a difference.