"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
I’d like to register my protest at the now-widespread tendency to refer to the President as “the commander-in-chief” or worse “our commander-in-chief,” full stop. To my ear, the connotations are perilously close to those of the Roman title imperator and it makes the President sound like some kind of warrior-king.
As the Constitution makes clear, the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the rest of us haven’t been drafted yet.
Do you protest only the lingo, or also the substance of the presidential absolutism and red state fascism put in place by GW and his Administration and now both baldly defended by McSame, Yoo, the editorial pages of the WSJ, and the entire right wing noise machine?
I don’t think you have written a lot, lately, on these things.
Boumediene was a good opportunity to return to these topics.
Boumediene is better not spoken of. It was so blatantly the right decision — the only possible decision for a free country — that the only rational response to the hysterical right-wing attacks on it is to calmly vote straight-ticket Democrat for the first time in one’s life. It’s not even worth trying to discuss it with one’s Republican Christian friends, who would defend (actually, celebrate) The President if he ordered a nuclear attack on the Gaza Strip.
Er … maybe that’s just me, then.
Voting a straight Democratic ticket solves nothing, as the two parties are merely different sides of the same coin we flip every four years. Maybe the answer is a different coin.
I sort of like straigt Democrat, myself.
Even though presidents of all parties have collaborated in the inflation of presidential power since Washington.
Well, maybe Jefferson.
Still, at least some degree of denazification is more likely with solidly Democratic control for a while of all 3 branches than with any part of power in the hands of the GOP.
Gaius – I definitely object to the substance as well as the lingo.
As for voting, I think, despite my lack of faith that Obama & the Dems will actually make correcting these abuses a priority (see, e.g. their behavior on FISA just today, in fact), it’s crucial that the GOP be punished with massive electoral defeat. The Dems have gone along with way too much of this stuff, but the GOP and its right-wing media cheerleaders have been, for the most part, positively bloodthirsty in their support of presidential absolutism, “enhanced interrogation,” etc.
Living in DC, of course, I have the luxury of not voting Democratic if a sufficiently appealing third-party candidate should appear. 😉
A Thinking Reed 
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