The trail of tears of imperial ambition. Pride goeth before a fall – a truism of history which goes repeatedly unheeded.

As the end is restoring democratic process, so the means should be democratic. It’s true that since 2004 the president’s positive ratings in the polls have plummeted, but there is no guarantee that this shift in opinion will translate into Republican defeats in the forthcoming congressional election, and a renewal of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress would add another stamp of approval to the Bush policies, however misguided.

[snip]

#8230;The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world’s greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else - if conceived in terms of military force - has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force - and the fool of history.

[snip]

What the true greatness - or true power - of the United States is or can be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in pressing need of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power - military, economic, political, moral - would need searching reconsideration. Those true powers - especially the economic - also have an “imperial” aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of military domination of the globe that has addled so many American brains for more than half a century and also shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have accompanied the inevitable frustration of these delusions, the debate would take realistic stock of the nation’s very considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done. Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States into a stretched definition of “empire”, but it would look nothing like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States rededicated to its constitutional traditions and embarked on a cooperative course with other nations would find that it possesses untapped reserves of political power, though it will take time for US prestige to recover from Bush’s squandering of it.

[snip]

8230;The lesson most of the US learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong. (In general, America’s imperial-minded presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.)

Vice President Dick Cheney, who had served as chief of staff for president Gerald Ford, drew an opposite lesson - that the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it: “Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority … the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area.”

Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale, Cheney sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an old theme back in new guise - that US weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion - this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition - is the country’s problem.

Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq war and the failed vision it embodies should, with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the opposite - to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start saying and doing something new. Article

Sloughs off the utter gravity of the Constitutional crisis and the situation a bit too readily, but still it is vital that the topic be presented and re-presented via the traditional media until it has been pounded into the general public’s consciousness.

For some reason, that separation-of-powers idea seems to throw President Bush for a loop. Indeed, he seems to have thought not much at all about the meaning — or the purpose — of the entire Constitution. To watch him in action, one might imagine he regards the document as a cheerful compilation of suggestions — a hodgepodge of sensible advice worth dipping into now and then.

But of course the Constitution is far more than a compendium of pretty-good ideas. Indeed, there’s nothing “a la carte” about it. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it blueprint of American democracy, which describes the architecture of American government. Its division of authority among three branches — legislative, executive and judicial — is America’s surest shield against autocracy. Article