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I've been somewhat out of the loop and what not, and I haven't read all the comments here, but I've got to say, I find the fact that we've progressed to the point where a war czar has been proposed and there's barely an audible sigh from the American public.
I can tell you this. If the founders were alive today and they heard talk of a war "czar" they'd probably express, in some lofty 18th century English no doubt, what Charlton Helton expressed at the end of Planet of the Apes when he saw the Statue of Liberty submerged.
Let's pause for a moment and consider what "czar" implies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar
Originally, and indeed during most of its history, the title tsar meant Emperor in the European medieval sense of the term, i.e., a ruler who has the same rank as a Roman or Byzantine emperor due to recognition by another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch). Occasionally, the word could be used to designate other, non-Christian supreme rulers. In Russia and Bulgaria, the imperial connotations of the term were blurred with time and by the 19th century it had come to be viewed as an equivalent of king,[1].[2] The modern languages of these countries use it as a general term for a monarch.[3][4] For example, the title of the Bulgarian monarchs in the 20th century was not generally interpreted as imperial (although the title was possibly implying imperial ambitions.
Ok, the word czar was the Russian version of Caesar. The founders HATED Caesar. They thought he was one of the world's greatest villians of all time. They read Cato's Letters and thought Brutus a hero and what not.
There should be no title whatsoever in the United States of America that has "czar" as part of the title (one could also bring up the expanded police state powers and curtailment of liberty that have risen concomitantly with the "drug czar").
Hell, you may as well call this new position the War King or War Emperor.
"Pax Americana" indeed. Every day that goes by neoconservatievs of the PNAC variety betray their deep seated antipathy to the bedrock that this nation was founded upon: democracy.
