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Bush Crossed The Rubicon A Long Time Ago.

Even the weak, first effort of Democrats in the Senate to advise against escalation of war in Iraq has been met with a stonewall of Republican resistance. Their effective majority of the Republican Royalists and phony “moderates”, with the help of the de facto Republican, Lieberman, will ensure that the United States will follow Bush and Cheney into an expanded folly.

When the Constitution was first taught to us the “balance of powers” was given as the proof that the “founders” were geniuses. We were taught that the powers of congress would eternally be enough to ensure that, among other monarchal catastrophes, one man couldn’t take the country into a disastrous war of conquest. By that time a line of presidents from Truman on hadcertainly shown that to be a lie*. We don’t live in a Republic in so far as our foreign policy goes, certainly not in matters of war. Any president can conduct a minor war at will. And with this war on top of the Vietnam war they can honestly claim absolute power to get us into wars longer than both of the World Wars.

War is different. It is the most serious thing that a country can do. It is a guarantee that large numbers of people will be killed by the state, both on the other side and on “our” side. War always brings with it every evil imaginable as order and morality give way to the war itself. Our constitution as it really is, not as the liars teach it, gives the power to start war to the executive branch with no real limit. Our media tried to use the war Clinton conducted against Serbia to hurt him politically but they didn’t really try to stop him. Other than that little has been done to discourage participation in a war since Republican isolationists, delayed the entry of the United States into the developing World War. I will point out, because I will never forget, that more than a few of the isolationists were great fans of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Bush war in Iraq, following on his father’s war on Iraq, is the most incompetent of the dishonest and illegal wars brought by American presidents. The inability of the congress, specifically the Senate, to pull us out of it is absolute proof that the Constitution as it really is endangers all of us. The consensus that there is no way to prevent the insane junta from getting us involved in what anyone with a brain would know will be an even greater disaster, war with Iran, should make us rise up as a body and yell at the top of our voices. But, now as it is beginning, an effective majority of seem to either be on the take or more interested in trivia.

The American People can do the right thing if they know what is really happening. The presidential horse-race, the Oscars, the rotting corpse of what passes these days as a sex goddess and a thousand other distractions are presented by the media to keep them from doing the right thing. By the time the People can’t avoid dealing with it, Bush’s attempted use of a larger disaster to save his crime family from the garbage heap of history, the world could be a much different place than it is today. Blair’s pre-Iran bugging out might indicate that even he knows what’s coming. He is a known rat, the ship is taking on water fast.

* As a comment at Echidne's blog said, the practice of presidents starting wars without the consent of Congress predates Truman. But the practice has been getting steadily worse since the Korean War. The ability to actually start a war is to the authority to declare war is a real power, the "authority" has evolved into a game of 'let's pretend'. Unfortunately the balance of powers has too. Let's stop pretending about that.