King George

HuffPo:

Bush's dismissal of the law, which he stood before the country to defend yesterday, is outrage enough. But even more outrageous is what it represents: the belief that the President, or more specifically, President Bush, is above the law; that authority emanates from him and him alone; that the Social Contract has only one signatory and he sits in the Oval office. Didn't we fight some kind of war about that some time in the late 18th century?

Apparently, a secret court that has never turned down a government request for a wiretap on American citizens is not enough to "connect the dots." Bush said he broke the law "to protect us," and then tried to get a little dirty by calling out the senators from "New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas to go home and explain" why their opposition leaves those cities unsafe. (I guess it's easy to forget that Senators represent states and not cities when you believe you are the Royall Authoritie of the Lande.)

It would be one thing if we were safer. But our modern day Sun King cloaks his seizure of power in so much poll-tested national security language despite that he is not, in fact, protecting us at all. The residents of the three cities Bush cited voted overwhelmingly against him because they rightly sensed that Bush's reckless foreign adventures and lack of a real domestic security policy MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE. It doesn't take much critical analysis to figure out why. Here is a guy who, after September 11, failed to increase funding for nuclear non-proliferation, which the non-partisan commission the President himself appointed called the single greatest threat to our safety. Collecting the world's loose nukes was the first thing on my mind on September 12th, 2001, so I'm a little confused as why it's taken the President four years to catch on.