I fully agree with you about the presidency and unnecessary wars. Not to mention self-aggrandizement.

At any rate, neither a self-absorbed loafer nor a mad meddler!

Sure, it’d be great having a virtuous president and all, but the fact is, virtuous people don’t go into politics anymore, and until that situation changes, the less the President does the better.

Experience shows that government is only at its most effective when at its most destructive. No ones saying we should pay the president millions to play golf. We’re saying that the country and world would be much better off if the president of the United States stopped trying to run the country and the world.

That he’d “play golf” is just Cusack’s somewhat lyrical way of saying he’s not sitting in the Oval Office with his advisors saying “Let’s fix this! Let’s fix that! This place looks ripe for bombing! Let’s do something big to mark my place in history!”

On the other hand, why spend millions in public funds each year to support a man’s golf game?

I suspect there is plenty of real work for a president to do by way of protecting the freedom of his citizens, restricting the power of government, and establishing and maintaining respectful relations with other sovereign states.

And I suspect the so-called Founding Fathers would have rather seen future presidents working in that way as opposed to spending most of his days playing golf (with the support of tax payer dollars).

The idea is that if he’s playing golf, then he’s not causing trouble for the citizens or the world.

According to the law, the President of the United States is not someone whose role is to “help solve problems”, except in so far as they relate to his job, which for the most part is merely to execute the laws enacted by Congress.

Because the Presidential office was usurped such an amazing array of power that it has no actual right to, we would all be much better off if the President was playing golf rather than working with his advisors to try to find new ways to restrict the freedom of his citizens, increase the power of the government, or wage unnecessary wars.

The president is certainly not God. Nor is he a king. A president is an elected official who works for the nation you say can take care of itself. If his role is, as you say, to help solve problems, then how does playing golf most of the time accomplish this? The fact is, the president of the United States is a salaried employee (or public servant, if one prefers), not an entrepreneur, much less a noble or an aristocrat.

Forgive my lecturing tone — perhaps I was more put off by your “It’s simple” than I should have been. Apologies.

It’s simple. A President who plays golf all day knows that he is not God, that the nation he represents can take care of itself, and that his role is to help solve problems, and not, by busy work, to create them.