The President We Were Warned About

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy our experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. That's just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war — the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

In his "Political Observations," written years before he had served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever.

"In war," Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of our current King George, imperiously undermining Congress' attempts to end the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S. Constitution explained why that document grants Congress — not the president — the exclusive power to declare and fund wars, Madison wrote, "The delegation of such powers (to the president) would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments."

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http://www.creators.com/opinion/robert-scheer/the-president-we-were-warned-about.html

Purveyor

Should it be ironic, in a historic contest if the first George they was figthing in the 1770s, are the same enemy they have in the 21 century... But this time it come from the inside and not from a Great Imperium...

And it should be tragic, that the same name who once whas one of the reason United States of America was standing up to the brittish overlords. At the same man who maybee even manage to destroy the republic the same name once made posibile... If it was not for a werry stubborn King George 3 of UK.. maybe the republic of United States was never to be..

And now, US have a "new King" who belive he are the one who are the sole sourch of everything.. As the old kings of yesterday..

Diclotican

Sorry my bad engelish, not my native language

who had the most royal blood in their family tree, and they gave the nod to Bush, as if this were something that should be of consideration in electing a President.

Having come to power in the manner he did, for Bush to trash the Constitution is only a natural progression of what was set in motion by the corporate media and the felonious five.

Thanks for the thread, Purveyor.

In the end the Constitution is, of itself, nothing more than a few sheets of old parchment. It cannot rise to its own defense, and once no one is left to defend it, it and the system of government it codifies can simply dry up and crumble away. I would rather they now declare the end of our democracy and the establishment of whatever shall follow, instead of continuing this sham of an uninterrupted Constitutional government. It dishonors the Constitution, the Founders, and the memory of what once was to pretend that the system of government our forebearers created two centuries ago survives today. At least the Romans had enough sense of decency to declare the end of their Republic.