My fellow Americans, with less than one year left in my Presidency, the Union is in deep doo-doo so I want to instead take this opportunity to recap where I have taken the Office of the Presidency during my tenure, what it now means to be me, President George W. Bush, and what you can expect from me during this coming last year of my Presidency and beyond:

First, I have convinced America that this country is at War. War can only constitutionally be declared by Congress and Congress has neither been asked to do, nor has it done, any such thing -- but I have fueled a state of Fear and Hatred, which I use as a substitute for an actual war. Congress hasn’t called me on this, so I get to call myself a “Wartime President” and I then presume to justify most everything else I have done by suggesting that I have some kind of constitutional “free pass”. Find it in the Constitution and you win a prize, but here’s a hint: no such authority exists.

Second, because you have given me the latitude to claim wartime “power”, I’ve decided that I'm now “the Decider”. And what I claim the power to decide does, in fact and in demonstrated reality, include the following. I claim that, as the President of the United States, I can do or cause the following:

1. Arrest or detain any person, without charges, and hold them indefinitely.

2. Kidnap any person.

3. Torture any person.

4. Kill any person.

5. Wiretap or spy on any person without regard for existing laws making it a felony to do so without a warrant.

6. Refuse, in writing, to enforce laws as written and enacted by Congress if, in my view, it would not be a good idea to enforce that law.

7. Appoint people to positions in my administration based upon their personal loyalty to me.

8. Rewrite the analyses of existing governmental agencies, before they are publicly released, to assure that only views that I like are reflected, regardless of the expertise or experience of the persons or agencies which had repared their own consensus analyses.

9. Unilaterally commit American military forces to long-term engagements around the world.

In addition, as a corollary to the above powers, I can Decide that I will refuse to respond to any request for testimony or documentary information related to the Decisions made by me or my administration, whether that request comes from Congress or elsewhere, and regardless of whether the request comes in the form of a subpoena.

Third, although the illegality of my actions is virtually certain, you can be assured that I will exercise all available legal defenses if challenged, from stonewalling to appealing any adverse legal ruling, and beyond. Accordingly, as there is only one year left in my administration, there is no possibility that any action I have taken can effectively be challenged while I am in office. Thus, I can be neither challenged, nor convicted, nor impeached during the balance of my administration and there’s simply no point in even trying.

Good luck and good night. Suckers.

The conduct of the Bush Administration has been felonious. The philosophy of the Bush Administration has been both monarchical and secretive. None of this is consonant with the Constitution.

When Nancy Pelosi, naively awash in good feelings and "bi-partisan cooperative spirit", announced that "impeachment is off the table" shortly after the 2006 election, she did two things, neither of which she intended but both of which were sadly predictable: (1) gave the President a virtual pass on prior actions and (2) created the impression that the rest of the term was open season. Neither humbled, shamed nor grateful, the President has simply taken Pelosi up on that and has proceeded to openly gut the Constitution.

The simple fact is that Pelosi's apparent presumption that there somehow wasn't "enough time left" in the President's administration to justify "diverting attention" to enforcing the Constitution was an horrific abdication of Constitutional obligation by the Congress. Bluntly put, the Constitution deserves vigilant protection all the time and, if "two years" is not enough time to undertake impeachment proceedings, exactly when will there not be a two year election cycle in place?

The most recent spate of just ridiculously abhorrent and blatantly dictatorial actions to spew forth from the Bush Administration -- Mukasey's waterboarding fiasco, the in-your-face despotism of the most recent "signing statement", citing one extra-constitutional Presidential fiat (long term commitments on the ground in Iraq) as "precedent" to support subsequent and independently unconstitutional other fiats -- must be viewed by Pelosi as a call for at least a "clarification": when she said, in 2006, impeachment was "off the table", that could only have meant that based on what she knew at the time, it was her view that impeachment proceedings were not, in her view, viable -- but that she didn't mean prospectively to immunize the Executive Branch for whatever might happen....

Impeachment isn't a problem under the Constitution, impeachment is a solution built into the Constitution in order to allow the country to protect the Constitution from those who don't give a damn about it. Like, say, George W. Bush. Could anything be more clear than that?