Robert Scheer echoes Jim on James Madison

yesterday, i pulled jim's comment, in which he quoted james madison about the dangers of an imperial presidency, and bumped it into a full post... today, i find this from robert scheer, the excellent former la times columnist (who, sadly, was replaced by that dipshit extraordinaire, jonah goldberg)...

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

In his "Political Observations," written years before he served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. "In war," Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

scheer seizes on the very quote from madison that grabbed jim's attention...

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people -- just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

< sigh > we gotta get rid of 'em... we just gotta... every single day i wake up and think, my god, we simply CAN'T tolerate another day with that gang of criminals in office, and every night i go to bed thinking exactly the same thing...

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