petardier

Jeff Jacoby's column this week was even more devoid of reason than usual. His claim that Bush couldn't possibly be interested in having or using dictatorial power hinged on one (vague) statement in response to a recent Supreme Court case. He ignores all Bush's actions that might reasonably concern alert observers and pretends that such worries are coming from irrational Bush haters.

I sent the following letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. It hasn't been published yet, but no other letters on that column have appeared yet either. It could still happen.

If Jeff Jacoby really believes that ideological paranoia is what is making people concerned about President Bush's frequent and flagrant abuses of power, he can't be paying much attention to the news.

The Bush administration's authorization of torture, their unprecedented use of signing statements, their use of classification to cover up their actions, their illegal and unconstitutional spying on the telephone conversations of American citizens, and their unnecessary war fomented with cherry-picked intelligence are prime examples, to name but a few, of why the executive branch of our government was established with limits on its powers by our founding fathers. Plus, members of the Bush administration advocate a constitutional theory known as the "unitary executive" which strives to expand the already-considerable powers of the president. Actions like these cause well-justified concern on the part of those who are paying attention.

Is unlimited power, exercised in secret, dictatorial? I'd say it's getting perilously close.

And what does Mr. Jacoby offer in President Bush's defense? Words, not actions. He claims that President Bush has agreed to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. The thin and fishy statement he offers from the president, "We've got people looking at it right now to determine how we can work with Congress, if that's available, to solve the problem.", scarcely sounds like a guarantee of trials to those imprisoned at Guantanamo. Based on that statement and our president's record for parsing his words, I'd predict a year or two of legal obstruction instead of immediate trials.

I await the day when America has a Democratic president. I, for one, will be watching to see if Mr. Jacoby will still support an all-powerful and unsupervised presidency or whether his support for unlimited executive power is limited to executives he supports.