Of course, we won't be hearing the President make the above claim anytime soon -- he's still quite confident that he's the decider. But I'm sitting here wondering if this is still the United States of America, since I never realized it was possible here -- short of a military coup -- for a President and Vice President to declare that they alone have the power to preside over a war, and that Congress and the American people should just butt out.
Now mind you, I'm not so naïve as to think we haven't had our share of non-receptive leaders in the past half century or so. Lyndon Johnson couldn't accept the fact that the mighty USA could be stymied by a bunch of Reds holed up in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. Nixon and his sidekick Kissinger knew Vietnam was a lost cause but that didn't stop them from playing geopolitics with the lives of American soldiers; no wonder the wall on the Mall is etched with more than 50,000 names. Ronald Reagan was not exactly out absorbing common knowledge; in fact, he was dispensing his own, i.e., that ketchup was a vegetable, trees the cause of air pollution, and a certain epidemic one that dare not speak its name. Bush 41 certainly didn't engineer his mega-billion S&L bailout by listening to the average Joe, and now we have Bush 43 and his ghoulish Veep telling us that ... well, first let's sing a few lines from the musical Wicked:
Popular!
You're gonna be popular!
It's all about popular!
Very popular!
... telling us that they don't care about being popular, which is why they're escalating -- no, not escalating -- augmenting -- the Iraq war so victory will be ours. They understand that Congress is not on board and that the American people think it's a bad idea, but they know better, and that's why they're going to conduct the war as they see fit. End of story.
They do have a point. After all, it is their war. They started it -- why shouldn't they get to finish it? How dare Congress try to take it away from them. How dare Congress ... do anything.
Have we gone from a do-nothing Congress to a can-do-nothing Congress? Is this the final stake in the heart of checks and balances, the final tooth on the chain saw that amputates one complete branch of the federal government? To hear Bush and Cheney tell it, Congress is a powerless body that is powerless because it dares present a diversity of opinion, whereas this White House prides itself on its "I'm the decider" mentality -- one Bush, one brain (or close enough) making all the decisions that those in the inner circle have -- well, we won't say made for it, but something like that.
Yep, according to Bush and Cheney, Congress and the American people are not there to play the role of "surge protectors," so to speak. Bush has "made [his] decision ... and we're going forward," and Cheney says "you cannot run a war by committee," which means -- well, how are they running this war? Given its success so far, maybe a committee of some sort would be a good idea.
Oh, come on, Mr. Vice President, you just don't want this war run by someone else's committee, that's all. You want all the glory for yourselves. That's the glory down the road, mind you. You know it's out there if you just tough it out, and no congressperson or voter or war casualty can stop you from getting it.
But can the insurgents stop you? I'm talking about the ones in Iraq, not on Capitol Hill. Does this surge in the number of U.S. troops take into account that for every action there is a reaction? Sometimes it seems Bush/Cheney are more focused on battling the "war" at home than the one in the Middle East.
It's hard to believe that Congress, which rolled over and played dead when the Iraq war was launched, will roll over and play dead again now that the President has listened to the thumpin' he got in the election and from the Iraq Study Group and whomever else he "consulted" before he decided that the way out of Iraq was not more of the same but more more of the same.
Either Congress asserts itself or we take the org chart that the Founding Fathers drew up and reconfigure it with the President at the very top. Then we'll have one more irony to lament -- that the so-called crusade for a democracy in Iraq ended up the key factor in unraveling our own.