E Pluribus Unum

Things from Bush's Tuesday Rose Garden presser that you can brush off as just so much baloney:

"My main job is to protect the people..."

Bush's main job is to protect the Constitution, not the people. That job description is so fundamentally important that he is required to swear an oath to fulfill it upon taking office. It's right there in...the Constitution!

Gosh, what could the framers have been thinking?

They were thinking that we needed to live in a Constitutionally limited republic where the people have certain inalienable rights. They were thinking that those rights must be protected against encroachment by any single individual seeking to gain absolute power. You know -- like the King against whom the colonists were rebelling.

As such, in Article I, they laid out the blueprint for the Legislative branch which was to be a co-equal branch to the Executive branch whose blueprint came in Article II. The co-equality was implemented through an intricate (but easy to understand) system of checks and balances.

Harry Reid:

[Bush] is president of the United States, not king of the United States. He has another branch of government, a legislative branch of government, he has to deal with.

Which brings us to Bush Baloney #2:

Congress shouldn't tell generals how to run the war.

But the fact remains: The military answers to a higher civilian authority, namely the President and his various delegates (e.g., the Secretary of Defense). In addition Congress has the authority to declare war and control the allocation of war funding. But above and beyond all that, these civilian authorities are nothing more than public servants who serve at the pleasure of the people. If the people want an end to a war, they have the final say so via the ballot box. True, the results of an election are not alwas easy to interpret, especially when it comes to foreign policy. But if ever there was a time when it was, this is it.

But why am I telling you that? You get it. It's Bush who doesn't understand his own job description.