Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 945 Editor's Choice: 126
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Playing the Hashishim's Game
[Read the article: The danger of Bush's anti-Iran fatwa]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Our President, finding himself on the ropes, is groping for a strikeable match to light off an enormous conflagration. Still hoping to save his "legacy" (and that's all any of this has ever been about anyway)he realizes that a huge backdraft (as opposed to "backdoor draft") in the middle east could swing public opinion and make him appear correct in at least some random pronouncement he's made since his ascendance to Idiot In Chief. Flaming Iran by assassinating (or more appropriately, murdering) Iranian nationals in Iraq is bound, one would think, to bring a quick and deadly response both in the current battle zone, throughout the world and, ultimately, right here at home, which would be a dream come true for this whipped dog of a President still trying to save some of his own imagined glory.
By misreading (big surprise there) history and trying to turn it upside down by turning the tables on the spiritual descendants of Hasan i Sabbah, Bush has inverted the entire equation and will most certainly reap the whirlwind for all of us if he is not reigned in at once. Not only is his latest trick as morally vacuous as all the preceding ones, but it is one which could actually bring trouble to our doorstep, something which has been, up til now, largely a bogeyman created by the Bush administration, the media and the Lunatic Right. Strange bedfellows for a 3-way? Not really. They're all brothers of the same lodge, and they've come to feed on our backwardness.
Apparently the President has had Dick Cheney reading Dinesh D'Souza to him at bedtime and has taken it all to heart. Those leftist, liberal, Democrat swine caused all this, and now it's our duty to fix it. Yeah, that's the ticket.
As I have said before here, in other circumstances, there are fewer things more dangerous than a 60 year-old man with nothing to lose. Our President fills that bill to a T. If we don't make an even louder noise, backed up by real action, whatever happens next truly will be our own fault, because we lacked the will to do anything more than talk about it.
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The Fire This Time
[Read the article: The power of King George]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Epps is not only clutching at the wrong straws - purposely - but is essentially wrong. Our Constitution is a dynamic instrument and it is solely the challenge of whoever would seize the tiller at any given moment to interpret it in the way which will best suit the needs and interests of our nation.
The President has failed and failed miserably, abysmally. We all know that. It is beyond an emergent situation now: we are at a crossroads which can only be negotiated by Congress and the power to do that negotiating is just as readily available to Congress via the Constitution as it is to the President, and moreso. It is a situation comparable to a volunteer fire department (an example given to us by Benjamin Franklin). The President is analagous to the fire chief, who is responsible for day-to-day tactical decisions and successful performance of his crews (read "troops") on the fireground; But he is nothing more than that. He is also serving at the pleasure of the membership, which in turn represents the community (the People). The board of directors (the Congress) and the Trial Board (the Supreme Court) both hold the ultimate power of decision regarding starting (and consequently stopping) actions. Even during a working fire of significant scale, if the fire chief appears to be losing control of a situation the board of directors, represented by the president of the corporation (or Speaker of the House) may be relieved of his duty as Incident Commander (Commander in Chief)and quite possibly dismissed from his position if his ineptitude has caused sufficient damage to the community or endangered its neighbors (the world).
The fire chief is a blundering fool. The board of directors has the power to confound him and to impeach him. The President is beyond any blundering rural-suburban fire chief with a Napoleonic complex. He is a clear and present danger to the nation and to the world at this point, and the Constitution, properly interpreted (as it has always been) by the legislature instead of the executive, can and must be used to bring down a clear and present menace to the world community.
In short, Epps is not only wrong, but dead wrong. And if we, The People, the membership of this vast volunteer company, don't bring sufficient pressure upon our "board of directors" to act, now, decisively, and in the way that past Presidents have chosen to act with regard to the Constitution, we will have no one but ourselves (and people like Garrett Epps, those with no vision nor any capability to see more than one side of an issue at the same time) to blame.
It is time to, in the words of the old spiritual, "Tear This Building Down." We have met the enemy - and we know exactly who he is.
Let's roll.