{"id":15508,"date":"2021-01-19T15:46:21","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T20:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15508"},"modified":"2021-01-19T15:46:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T20:46:21","slug":"lets-abolish-those-presidential-medals-of-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/19\/lets-abolish-those-presidential-medals-of-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Let&#8217;s Abolish Those Presidential Medals of Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Mises Institute, January 19, 2021<\/h3>\n<h2 class=\"page-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/lets-abolish-those-presidential-medals-freedom\">Let&#8217;s Abolish Those Presidential Medals of Freedom<\/a><\/h2>\n<div id=\"slideshow\" class=\"group-image-wrapper field-group-html-element pull-left\">\n<div class=\"image border-secondary\">\n<div id=\"flexslider-1\" class=\"flexslider optionset-node-slideshow flexslider-processed\">\n<div class=\"flex-viewport\">\n<ul class=\"slides\">\n<li><img decoding=\"async\" draggable=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.mises.org\/styles\/slideshow\/s3\/static-page\/img\/biden-medal-wire.jpg?itok=k5PgTUGM\" alt=\"biden medal of freedom\" \/><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"tags\"><span class=\"tag-label bold\">Tags<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/topics\/us-history\">U.S. History<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"required-fields group-date-author field-group-html-element\"><span class=\"date\">1 min ago<\/span><span class=\"author\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/profile\/james-bovard\" rel=\"author\">James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"body-content clearfix\">\n<p>The <em>Washington Post<\/em> is outraged that Donald Trump has sullied one of Washington\u2019s most hallowed honors\u2014Presidential Medals of Freedom. After the White House announced plans to bestow the medals on two Republican members of Congress and a football coach, the <em>Post <\/em>thundered that \u201cTrump just underlines his own unworthiness when he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/trump-cant-be-trusted-to-hand-out-medals-let-alone-serve-as-commander-in-chief\/2021\/01\/14\/0fe0abe0-5519-11eb-a08b-f1381ef3d207_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">makes a mockery<\/a> of the Medal of Freedom\u2026.This president cannot be trusted to hand out medals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Post <\/em>editorial concluded with the obligatory uplift of the season: \u201cThankfully, the Oval Office will soon be occupied by a president\u2014himself a rightful recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom\u2014who understands and will honor the traditions of the presidency.\u201d Did Biden receive the Medal of Freedom for taking the lead in enacting the 1994 crime bill, which the\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em> reported helped <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/06\/25\/us\/joe-biden-crime-laws.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">spawn<\/a> \u201cthe explosion of the prison population\u201d? Did Biden receive the medal for helping Barack Obama win reelection in 2012 by telling black voters that Mitt Romney would \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/blogs\/burns-haberman\/2012\/08\/theyre-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains-updated-132073\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">put you all back in chains<\/a>\u201d? No, he simply received it for being Obama\u2019s vice president, pocketing the award shortly before Obama left office. But from the <em>Post<\/em>\u2019s view, the fact that Biden received a Washington honorific that included the name \u201cfreedom\u201d proves that he is honorable.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ranker.com\/list\/presidential-medal-of-freedom-winners\/reference\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Presidential Medals of Freedom<\/a> have long been far more squalid than the <em>Washington Post <\/em>recognizes\u2014in part because the <em>Post <\/em>cheered the wars that spurred many of the most tainted awards.<\/p>\n<p>President Lyndon Johnson distributed a bucket of Medals of Freedom <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_recipients#Awarded_by_Lyndon_B._Johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">to his Vietnam War architects and enablers,<\/a> including Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, and McGeorge Bundy. When he gave the award to Defense secretary Robert McNamara, he declared, \u201cYou have understood that while <a href=\"https:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/documents\/remarks-upon-presenting-the-medal-freedom-robert-s-mcnamara\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">freedom depends on strength<\/a>, strength itself depends on the determination of free people.\u201d In reality, Johnson treasured McNamara for his ability to help deceive Americans about how the US\u00a0was failing in Vietnam. McNamara\u2019s lies helped vastly expand an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and Vietnamese lives. The <em>Washington Post <\/em>editorial page didn\u2019t complain about those awards, because the <em>Post <\/em>avidly supported that war. (After exiting the Pentagon, McNamara joined the <em>Post<\/em>\u2019s board of directors.)<\/p>\n<p>President Richard Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and expanded and intensified US\u00a0bombing of Indochina. Nixon gave Medals of Freedom to Pentagon chief Melvin Laird (who helped shroud the war\u2019s continuing failure) and his secretary of state, William Rogers. President Gerald Ford gave the Medal of Freedom to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld\u2014two persons notorious for tarnishing the honor of the United States in foreign affairs. The <em>Post<\/em> didn\u2019t denounce the Medal of Freedom for Kissinger; instead, they made the Great Deceiver a columnist.<\/p>\n<p>President George H.W. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_recipients#Awarded_by_George_H._W._Bush\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bush blanketed<\/a> Medals of Freedom on top officials involved with the first Gulf War, including Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft. The <em>Post<\/em> didn\u2019t complain about those awards, because that was another war that the <em>Post <\/em>editorial page whooped up all the way.<\/p>\n<p>The war on terror made Presidential Medals of Freedom even more shameless. Retired colonel\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/how-the-medal-of-freedom-became-a-fraud\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Andrew Bacevich observed<\/a>, \u201cAfter 9\/11, the Medal of Freedom went from being irrelevant to somewhere between whimsical and fraudulent. Any correlation with freedom as such, never more than tenuous in the first place, dissolved altogether.\u201d After he deceived America into supporting an attack on Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush conferred Medals of Freedom on his <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_recipients#Awarded_by_George_W._Bush\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Iraq war team<\/a>, including CIA chief George \u201cSlam Dunk\u201d Tenet, Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, General\u00a0Peter Pace, General\u00a0Richard Myers, and General\u00a0Tommy Franks, as well as prowar foreign lackeys such as Australian former prime minister John Howard and British former prime minister Tony Blair. The <em>Post <\/em>was outraged, because\u2014no, wait,\u00a0the <em>Post <\/em>editorial page thunderously supported that war, too.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps because Trump did not start any disastrous wars which he had to paper over with awards to failed generals, he has distributed much fewer Medals of Freedom than other recent presidents. Sports figures were among the most notable recipients, including Jerry West, Tiger Woods, Lou Holtz, and Gary Player. Like prior presidents, Trump gave the award to some of his political allies and supporters, including Representative\u00a0Jim Jordan, Representative\u00a0Devin Nunes, and Rush Limbaugh.<\/p>\n<p>A long series of American presidents could not have done so much to trample our rights and liberties and to wreak havoc around the globe without the aid of people with neither scruples nor decency. Medals of Freedom are one of the cheapest ways for rulers to reward their lackeys. The names of many of the medal recipients look like confirmation of the famous passage from Friedrich Hayek\u2019s chapter in <em>The Road to Serfdom<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWhy the Worst Get on Top\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader\u2026.The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such and the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Except for Kissinger, of course.<\/p>\n<p>Presidential Medals of Freedom encourage Americans to view their personal freedom as the result of government intervention\u2014if not as a bequest from the commander in chief. Ironically, the individual who poses the greatest potential threat to freedom has sole discretion to designate the purported best friends of freedom. The media usually provides gushing coverage of the award ceremonies, never mentioning that the arbitrary power of the Supreme Leader was why the Founding Fathers fought a revolution.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Post <\/em>editorial page was correct when it declared, \u201cThis president cannot be trusted to hand out medals.\u201d But if Biden starts a war and scatters Presidential Medals of Freedom like cluster bombs on the war makers, the <em>Post<\/em> will be cheering all the way. In reality, no president can be trusted to designate the true champions of freedom. At a minimum, Presidential Medals of Freedom should be suspended until presidents cease acting like czars or elective dictators. If that beneficent reform occurs\u2026don\u2019t wait up for the next award ceremony.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mises Institute, January 19, 2021 Let&#8217;s Abolish Those Presidential Medals of Freedom Tags U.S. History 1 min agoJames Bovard The Washington Post is outraged that Donald Trump has sullied one of Washington\u2019s most hallowed honors\u2014Presidential Medals of Freedom. After the White House announced plans to bestow the medals on two Republican members of Congress and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2124,10,708,75,833],"class_list":["post-15508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biden","tag-bush","tag-trump","tag-war","tag-washington-post"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Let&#039;s Abolish Those Presidential Medals of Freedom - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Presidential Medals of Freedom should be abolished because they reward servility and generals who lose wars\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/19\/lets-abolish-those-presidential-medals-of-freedom\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Let&#039;s Abolish Those Presidential Medals of Freedom - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism &amp; Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism &amp; Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15509,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15508\/revisions\/15509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}