My letter to the Wall Street Journal:

To: feedback@wsj.com, newseditors@wsj.com, wsj.ltrs@wsj.com, b.grueskin@wsj.com, j.heller@wsj.com, t.cullen@wsj.com, dpatton@dowjones.com, g.griffin@wsj.com, k.sells@dowjones.com, christine.mohan@dowjones.com, dave.pettit@wsj.com, j.fry@wsj.com

I've just read your very disturbing piece, written, by Harvey Mansfiled,

calling for the overthrowing of the United States government with a

dictatorship. At several points in the article, the word Fuhrer might as

well have been substituted. What in the hell are you people thinking,

and how could you promote such ideas? While what Mansfield proposes

might not exactly fit the legal definition of treason, the intent is

certainly there. You choose to be accessories to this by giving this

traitor a platform. Are you Nazis, Stalinists, what? Oh, that's right -

Machiavellians, I guess. Same difference.

As we stand at the precipice of the total destruction of this once great

nation and it's Constitution, The Wall Street Journal has clearly shown

where it stands. Thanks for making your position on this so crystal

clear. Noted!

What could you have been thinking? A front jacket-cover endorsement from...Alan Colmes? I was all set to pre-order the book when I enlarged the picture and saw the endorsement. Alan Colmes!? If Alan Colmes why not your middle school social studies teacher? Didn't anyone (publisher? family member? suicide-prevention counselor?), scream "Don't do it!" Oh, Mr. Greenwald, you might as well have announced that each copy is laced with anthrax.

"Funny how Mansfield doesn't use the more obvious term for one-man monarchial rule, king. I guess he could be referring to Machiavelli, but if Mansfield was really being honest he would call what he is describing a king (monarch at least).

Is it because the word king would stir the dumb people of America out of their stupor and make them realize what is going on?"

Well certainly no true american would bow down to a king, but why not a "commander"? Everything sounds better in Latin, just don't say "Rex". "History repeats herself, she has to, nobody listens the first time" Andrew Denton.

Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based.

yeah....this is a great angle. great insight, bro.

I don't believe I could have put it any better. So I'll say this. This man Mansfield reminds me of the Renfield character in "Bram Stoker's Dracula", directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Tom Waits does a great job as the fly-eating psycho who longs for Count Dracula's bite to give him immortality, except that Mansfield is blissfully unaware that Bush and Co. have another agenda entirely and rewarding worshipful sychophants isn't part of it. After all, to keep unimited power or to at least try requires that some people are going to get sacrificed from time to time. See Scooter Libby, Don Rumsfeld, and quite possibly, Alberto Gonzales. These were all loyal and adoring servants. Still when it came time for someone to be the scapegoat, they were axed or will be soon. Mansfield may be soon finding himself passed over for the reward of worshipping Bush, just as Renfield did when he cried out:

"Master! I have worshipped you! You promised me immortality. But you give it to the pretty one!"

Poor Renfield.

Poor Mansfield.

Just another thought: aspiring to unlimited power and actually having it are two entirely different things. Beyond the patholigical corruption at the heart of this exercise is an equally pathological stupidity and incompetence. Which means exactly this: they might have gotten their wish if not for the American people's insistence on the rule of law, expressed as the Democratic-led Congress' reinvigorated oversight, and the colossal, incomprehensible DUMB-ASSEDNESS of this administration. As Gary Kamiya put it a while ago, these people aren't smart enough to take out the trash, let alone rule the world. This is an administration of Pinkys with no Brain. That in itself gives me hope. Now Prof. Mansfield may not like this state of affairs but that's America. If it's tyranny he wants, there are plenty of places he can go to find just that.

What you are addressing is the issue of what most legal scholars have long debated; whether individual rights are absolute, limited solely be the powers we confer on our government, or, whether we have no rights except those explicitly granted by our government. This argument appeared settled until the Civil War and its aftermath, when the 14th Amendment reraised the issue of who makes the decisions, our government or us?

I am an ascriber to the limited powers of government, though I am not a Southerner. I just don't trust governments. Where Mansfield goes off the rails is to toss this whole debate aside and trash the very theory of government based on a social compact between its leaders and its citizens. To him, there is no social compact, just absolutism in the hands of whatever idiot inherits or is appointed our fearless leader.

I should have notice this first off, but missed in in the outrage over Mansfield's main premise. The idea that a "weak" leader is acceptable in "simpler times" is no less moronic than his central argument. It is in "simpler times" that the seeds of crises are oft sowed. 1914 would have been a year heralded as a "simpler time" but for the eruption of a small scale anarchist movement in Austria-Hungary's satellite, Serbia. The Nineties in America were such simpler times that a stained dress was considered an impeachable offense. Yet these were the same times when our President, hamstrung by a bellicose Republican Congress couldn't go after Osama Bin Laden, received only derision for destroying Saddam's remaining WMD stockpiles, and was hounded out of office for trying to use the threat of terror to steer attention away from his own flagrant adulteries.

Mansfield is not just an idiot, he is a complete and total idiot. The real question that should be asked, the same one that should be asked of the likes of D'Noush D'Souza, Ann Coulter, Richard Perle, et al, is who the hell are bankrolling this morons? Am I the only one who thinks lowering their taxes threatened our security by leaving them free to spend money on these people? You want to preserve our freedoms, double the taxes on the wealthy.