Dubya wrote an opinion column. Well, at least his name is on it. Shouldn’t they credit the starry-eyed Oral Roberts University grad or College Republican Lieutenant who no doubt saw this ghost-writing gig as his (uncredited) moment of Kool-Aid-fuelled glory?
It’s futile to deconstruct the disingenuous ramblings offered to the Wall Street Journal readership under the George W. Bush brand. The only thing I can’t resist pointing out is the central, maddening misconception of the Bush residency, George’s consistently expressed idea that his job description is one sentence long: keep America safe. I know his long-term memory may not be in stellar shape, but the oath of office he took pledges him to do one thing and one thing only, and it isn’t that, it’s this: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." The keeping America safe thing is what all those guys in the uniforms take care of for you, George.
Protecting the Constitution is the one thing he’s most consistently not done, claiming all sorts of extra-constitutional powers under the term "unitary executive" at the behest of Vice President Cheney. Cheney has been seeking broader and broader powers for the presidency since, as part of the Nixon and Ford administrations, he learned the real lesson of Watergate: the problem wasn’t that Nixon broke the law, but that the law wasn’t flexible enough to contain a visionary like Nixon. Thanks, Dick!
