For the past several years, when George Bush has stood before an audience of loyal cultists and urged "staying the course," he was not talking about Iraq. When he urged staying the course, he was assuring them that if they only could remain unwavering and unmoved, in spite of all reality, they might gain the ultimate power and control that has always been the endgame of the Neocon agenda. Staying the course is much more than Iraq. Iraq is a stop on the path. Staying the course is about reshaping the world to a pre-determined end; the goal line of staying the course is the neocon dream is to be the final word on the global stage. The goal is Empire.

Every move the administration has made has been about consolidating that power in the hands of the president, to remove him from all oversight or restraints. In this regard, they are, indeed, virulently anti-American in that they absolutely repudiate the system of checks and balances built into the constitution. They mean to rule without regard. Other letter writers have argued that they now have been granted that absolute power with the suspension of habeas corpus and broad powers of definition granted to the president. At the very least, with the stacking of the Supreme Court at every opportunity and with the complicity of a rubberstamp congress, the current situation is directly in opposition to what the framers of the Constitution intended. The checks and balances make no sense when only one viewpoint is heard; why put them into place if their only function is to rubberstamp each other?

Much as I hate the illegal occupation of Iraq (let's reclaim some of the rhetorical highground by refusing to call it a war), the issue of oversight is infinitely more important. It is a concept that should have had legs enough on its own. It should have been enough to campaign on the following issue, summed up in a scenario: Imagine you are in the ballot booth and on the ballot is only one question - Shall the Bush administration continue to be granted virtually unopposed power to act as they wish at their sole discretion? YES or NO?

Granted, many of his evangelical base would have no trouble voting yes, lured by visions of a uniform mandatory values and morality system imposed on the land, still never suspecting that the Neocon agenda is not their agenda; however, a REAL American - Republican, Democrat, or any flavor inbetween - should feel a queasy sickness at the thought of answering anything but NO.

It disturbs me that this issue alone can't be seen as justification enough, that curbing the administration's lust for unopposed power has to be combined with how badly the occupation has gone. The problem is not the occupation, it was the almost complete lack of objection, of oversight and accountability that is the problem. To me this election is not about the occupation; it is a referendum on whether the Constitution itself will continue to be the guiding principle by which this country is run, or are we really ready to toss it aside and build it around an executive branch granted with almost unlimited power?

This election, you can cast your vote against the illegal occupation if you want; better by far, I think, to cast your vote in favor of the constitution. America, cast your vote for America!

How well I remember the 2004 election night debacle. I remember a friend's teenage daughter crying unconsolably at our local Democrat headquarters after she'd spent 10 hours on the phone making get out and vote calls, only to watch as the country deliberately chose to keep going on its course for disaster -- a choice that could only be explained by a kind of deliberate blind obstinance. I felt terrible for her; her idealism had taken such a hard direct hit.

Other people that night were perplexed by my relative calm. I felt that we just hadn't learned a big enough lesson yet, but that lesson would come.

In the two years since that night, everything I and others had predicted that night has come to pass. The totality of the Iraq fiasco is undeniable; the lies that got us there are well known, good jobs are still going the way of the Dodo; Hurricane Katrina alone should be enough of a warning about where the administration's concerns and priorities lie.

But worse by far has been that the administration's push toward uncontested power couldn't be more obvious. They are working virtually with no limitations, and congress continues to sign away their power and responsibilities. The Constitution is in serious danger of becoming so many words on a piece of parchment, a quaint bit of trivia

So in 2006, I'm no longer philosophical. There is no excuse anymore; if we haven't learned all the lessons we need to learn by now, we simply will never learn them. We will have proven that as a nation we are just plain too stupid to live. The country will go on in some kind of form, but it won't be a democracy that we're living under. We will have installed a monarchy that will have two years to complete the transition into whatever form of government we will have in 2008.