This. Is not. “Wartime!”
If I hear some rightwing freak (e.g.) say “a wartime president must” this or “a wartime president must” that one more time, I think I will explode. If Bush is a “wartime president” then so was every president since the “Cold War” began. None of the presidents of the past 60 years attempted to scare the American People to death and then claim unprecedented and unconstitutional powers under the guise of “wartime.” Ok, there was Truman and the steel mills, but I don’t think even Truman tried to hide behind “wartime.” He said it was a national emergency, but that’s very different from claiming we’re “at war” and this is “wartime.”
Oh, and just as the right wing’s “wartime” logic would make all presidents of the last 60 years or so “wartime presidents,” it would also make all presidents in the foreseeable future “wartime presidents.” In that case, I guess we should just expect executive power to continue to expand until it entirely swallows the other two branches of government and we become an incredibly secure military-consumer fascist state where a tiny fraction of people are incredibly rich and the rest of us won’t even be able to eat cake.
Absurd? Certainly, but no more so than all this “wartime” ridiculousness. Damn, I wish the Democrats or someone in public life would shut this ridiculous rhetoric down! Where is the opposition to this madness!?
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October 4th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Well done. I’ve been spouting this same argument around the office, around friends and collegues, around cocktail parties for a few years now. Yet no one in the public circle has the gravitas to stop this sort of unhealthy rhetoric.
I suppose its left to the people. Why isn’t this an issue? Why is gay marriage an issue? Ugh.