You should lett he commander in chief to get back to doing his inportant job of keepin our hoimeland safe and/or secure in a time of war when our brave troops are fighting in Iraq in harm's way so BACK OFF AND LET HIM DO HIS JOB!!!

-- The Major

Um, he is not my commander-in-chief. He is an elected president. I am not in the military. To borrow a phrase that has been bandied about way too often lately, he serves at the pleasure of the American people. It is our government, not his, we create it in order to form a more perfect union, and so forth. It's all in our document that he swore to protect, defend, and uphold as a precondition to his job. If he has not done so, then our contract with him is broken, and we can remove him.

That holds regardless of whether the nation is at war or at peace. We the People do not have to "back off".

One of the lawyers can correct me if wrong, but I thought that the whole reason for the huge debate after 9/11 about setting up the Department of Homeland Security was because the Bush Administration wanted to treat the people hired into the DHS as at-will employees, unlike all other federal employees.

If my memory serves correctly, that means that political appointees are not at-will.

Hope I have the title right, this is off track, but I'm putting it out here in case anyone is interested in this trend. I was going to send the below to the NYT about David Brooks' defense of the Bush administration in this morning's paper.

In case the language is new to some, neuromorality is a new venture by the same people who read "The Arab Mind" and ran off to plan a war in Iraq in the 1990s. This time they've read Steven Pinker and Louann Brizendine and are resurrecting Thomas Hobbes and preaching, well, monarchy, for lack of a better phrase.

I read David Brooks' columns like I do a crossword puzzle: Can you find the entire list of Administration/Conservative talking points, dressed in eloquence, and ready to be loved at first sight? They are all there in "A Proper Distinction", Thursday March 22, the 93 prosecutors Clinton fired, the botching of the message, the presidential right to fire political appointees, the agenda for prosecuting immigration violations. But lately there is always a subtext in David Brooks' writings, that marks the agenda of the neuromoralists, a group formed recently to promote the idea that neuroscience has proved that Hobbes, morality, and extremely strong government have been proven in the chemistry of neuromodulators. One of the battles they need to fight is that their core beliefs are 180 degrees out of sync with those of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who wrote our Constitution. And so Mr. Brooks chips away, pushing Enlightenment thought off on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ignoring Locke and the Iroquois Nation, and pretending a vast gulf between the tabula rasa and Messrs. Jefferson and Madison.

Aha! I found it! "...but the founders, who had a low but accurate view of human nature...". Our founders believed in the noble savage, not the short, the brutish, and the violent, Mr. Brooks. And no amount of clever phrases quietly dipped in neuromorality and slyly slipped between the sheets of my morning paper will convince me otherwise. Now I've finished my morning puzzle, it's time for breakfast.

What I meant was that they might very well lie even when telling the truth wouldn't cost them anything.

We don't currently know their real agenda. We all think that they protect Rove, that they are embattled. But they didn't believe it was beyond the pale to call prosecutors about cases they were investigating because they were political appointees. Why would they not call Supremes about executive privilege? They are also political appointees, picked to support a political agenda, albeit ones that don't serve at the pleasure of the President.

If you know you are getting a favorable decision on executive privilege, then what is going on now is a necessary preliminary to an expansion of executive power, not an embattled White House flailing around and sinking in its own lies.

Ugh, too conspiratorial.