You Either Love Him or You Hate Him

I've always, I mean always, disagreed with that silly absolute.

George Will is a consistently Conservative commentator who views just happen to coalesce in a POV much more progressive than many on the Left. As a matter of fact, I've always found that Right and Left go out the window when it comes to Will. He's conservative. Not a total Wingnut for good's sake.

In today's Washington Post online, Will writes on the likelihood of a novel's worth of disclaimers Congress will find necessary the next time it votes on authorization for War Powers to a President.

[Link] But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.

(emphasis mine)


And it's not bad enough that this Administration is so inept that they can't seem to do anything according to their stated plan, they can't even agree on simple language giving equal powers to each of the three branches of our constitutional government!

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

I know it's been said many times and many ways but I'm not afraid because I'm doing something wrong. I'm afraid because the power being sought and claimed by this bunch of literal fascists makes it only necessary for me to disagree with them in order for them to procure a wiretap. If No One needs to verify the reasoning and necessity of such, then no one even needs know it's been activated or to what ends! THAT goes quite distinctly and precipitously against both the Spirit and the Letter of the Law.

Will goes on to refute another favorite neo-con dogmatism.

Besides, terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the "sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs." That non sequitur is refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make laws "necessary and proper" for the execution of all presidential powers . Those powers do not include deciding that a law -- FISA, for example -- is somehow exempted from the presidential duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

This kind of Opinion is, to my memory, fairly typical of Mr Will. I do think he gets caught up in his conservatism, sometimes to the exclusion of brilliant new understandings of our species ability to overcome trials of life. It takes a lot more than simple (LMAO!!!) individualism to deliver many of the assurances and assertions of the Declaration of Independance or our US Constitution and he does seem to be a little caught up tradition for tradition's sake.

But that's also something which I must admit to being a little bit, well, okay, extremely opposed to in my own thinking. In other words, I think tradition sucks ba... er, well, that is to say that I see more to eschew than to embrace in many of the traditions with which I've grown up.

So, the next time someone from the other side of the fence tells you "it's love him or hate him", just tell them that that is one tradition this country can absolutely use less of.


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That reminds me, something else this country can use less of is the idiotic argument that you have to be theist or agnostic because there's no way to be an honest atheist because you can't prove there can't be a sentient creator of our universe.

{shakin'head} Silly freakin' Humans...

The last several comments after mine were all sound reasons to keep reading TRA's site. And, as Mookie said, on this post he's finally got his head outta his a... uhhh, well, you can click the link and read it if ya like. {-;