| Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed, That he is grown so great? |
The late Senator Sam Ervin quoted the above Shakespeareism when confronted with a president – Richard Nixon – who at one point dared to declare that "the sovereign" (read: president) was above the law. Now it appears that we're back in the same situation. The president of the United States has been tapping phones and reading e-mail messages without benefit of a court order or warrant (or at least his minions have) because the congress's decision to let him send the military to Afghanistan, and more generally the Constitution of the United States, pretty much allow him to do anything he jolly well pleases. We are, after all, at war.
Aren't we?
Well, aside from the fact that the Constitution leaves it up to the congress to actually declare war, and it hasn't done so – technically, we haven't been in a war since the Japanese surrendered sixty years ago, though there are more than a hundred thousand American soldiers dead and an awful lot more civilians who happened to get in our way who may doubt this – the president himself seems rather doubtful about the situation. For instance, if we're at war, then anybody we capture would automatically be a prisoner of war, right? But they aren't – we've taken no POWs, only "enemy combatants", who apparently are not covered by the Geneva Convention. If you can't capture prisoners of war, then pretty obviously the little tiff in which you are engaged is not a war.
You can't have it both ways. Got it, Mr. Bush?
But even if we were at war, would that allow the president to break the law? For a country that went through, first, the War of the Revolution, in which approximately one third of the population was on the other side, and then the Civil War, in which half the population was on the other side, and in which a single battle could cause five to ten times as many American casualties as have resulted from all the terrorist attacks of the last century, the idea that the current threat is enough to cause us to throw out the protections that the Founding Fathers created to ensure our liberty is simply nonsensical. Those guys knew what they were about, after all; they'd just come out the far end of the War of the Revolution, bloody but unbowed.
If we were the nation we once were, rising up in righteous wrath and electing representatives who represented us and not just Wal-Mart or big oil, Bush and Cheney would both be facing articles of impeachment at this point rather than behaving as though they were doing us all a big, big favor by stealing our rights. But we aren't. We're not interested in liberty, or even security. All we're interested in is complacence.