Who’s in charge?

When I was a kid, Russian governance was particularly opaque. I never knew from “Chairman of the Presidium,” or “Chairman of the Central Executive Committee.” Nikita Khruschev was variously, “First Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (1953 - 1964) and “Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR” (1958 - 1964). Lavrentiy Beria doesn’t appear in any chart I’ve seen as a capo di tutti capi, but he was in charge of the NKVD at a time when its power was supreme.

Andropov was the KGB director who crushed the “Prague Spring” before emerging as supreme leader of the USSR. Putin was supposedly a mid-level functionary in the KGB back in the day. George Bush led the CIA under President Ford. William Casey died in time for Bush to be elected in ‘88 with no awkward grand jury indictments and so forth. After the Bush/Arab solidarity moment from ‘89 to ‘92, Bill Clinton emerged via the meritocracy as an actual USian leader. George Tenet was his CIA dude, and he was no Bill Casey. But he was there for the neocon PNAC outfit to hang dirty laundry on, while they consolidated some kind of shadow power under the regency of princeling Bush the Second. Obviously THAT Bush hasn’t been in charge for the last eight years, and suspicions that Cheney pwned the presidency abound, but there is no clarity in popular culture regarding who actually runs the show. In fact, people are more in tune with who has been voted off the island than with who holds legal and economic dominion over their lives. We know that Palin/McCain may emerge as this year’s American Idol on the staged reality show that our elections have become, but it remains a dark secret who put them in place and who intends to pull the strings during their puppet-show ascendancy.