"It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.
Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.
One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.
Of course not one sentence is based on any fact, but then again this is an opinion (anoymous as it is). Yet that said, let's get real. Of all the MSM hysteria over NSA or Prisons or Domestic Spying, there hasn't been one credible documented case of anyone getting their rights violated. Yet there is undeniable truth to the fact that this country hasn't been attacked since 9/11 - that in itself is the reason the left is so incensed.
Let's get real. This writer would like nothing better than to see another attack on the Bush watch, and yet since there hasn't been, well that simply pisses them off. So they have to come up with these fairytale scrary sceneros that NOBODY buys except their decrepted base of readers - or the Kos Kids - which is the same thing.
But the real story behind the anger of this write is here:
"This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.
But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity.
The hearings were a bizarre spectacle in which the top military lawyers — who had been elbowed aside when the procedures at Guantánamo were established — endorsed the idea that the prisoners were covered by the Geneva Convention protections. Meanwhile, administration officials and obedient Republican lawmakers offered a lot of silly talk about not coddling the masterminds of terror."
The SCOTUS ruled nothing of the kind. The fact is that they said that if the President wanted military tribunals he would have to go back to congress - which he is. The fact that the Supremes over stepped their authority notwithstanding - the President has the right to lead in the way which he sees as the best solution to protect this country. An attitude his predecessor didn't have or else we wouldn't be where we are now.
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