The reason you teach anything, especially Constitutional Law, when you don't have to, is because you think there's something worth passing on, like the American way of government, at its ideal best, at least.
So the Conlawprofs focus on all sorts of seeming inconsequentialities such as what this framer thought, or that, when the real issue is what we think, not the dead hand of the past. In the meantime, who's watching the store?
Congress has been asleep at the switch when it comes to the big issues, such as whether to go to war in Iraq for real reasons, not make believe, and whether to let the president get away with a system of illegal detentions and tortures that would have done Genghis Khan proud. Here Congress has gone blind.
Congress is wide awake and its olfactory sense in fine shape when it comes to smelling the pork however. Bridges-to-nowhere and "earmarks" for local worthless spending are the hallmark of our corrupt system. This is why the colonists rebelled incidentally, against a corrupt Parliament in bed with the king, another George.
Youngsters don't vote. I vote, but usually feel stupid for having made the effort, for I know full well it means nothing. Unless I raise a lot of dough, and spread it like manure in fertile fields, why would I expect to influence policy? Abramoff and Delay, now there were two who knew how to make democracy work for them.
Meanwhile we've lost eight more service people in Iraq overnight. Dozens of Iraqis, but do we lose sleep over that? Does George W? I doubt it.
Would you send your kid to Iraq to fight? If you were crazy you would.
The top British (our ally) general in Iraq, Patten, has said that his forces were simply making matters worse, serving as a goad to insurgents, who don't clean the mess. When they kill you in Iraq, they torture you first, to send a message to your relatives. If our top allied general says his half of the boat is sinking, what does this say about our half? We still maintain that we're going to keep 144,000 soldiers in Iraq for at least four more years, and for what? The eight who died last night, what did they die for? Democracy, motherhood and apple-pie? Or to fulfill Bush's fantasies of being a great war leader, avenging his father's detractors?
What is Congress going to do about this? We know that Bush is going to do nothing. He's impervious to reason. This is not a good sign. In a recent New Yorker article, former Pres. Bill Clinton answered the usual question about whether George W is stupid by saying no, it's just that he thinks differently. The real question is of George W's sanity, but this is a question no one touches.
Was Chairman Mao nuts when he killed millions of his countrymen with his hare-brained schemes, such as making steel in backyards, letting a thousand flowers bloom then instituting the Cultural Revolution which severely dented a culture that has withstood 8,000 years of lunacy and chaos?
Was Stalin nuts? Hitler? Milosevich? Kim Jung Il?
What does it take to properly diagnose a world leader as nuts?
Were the French and Germans nuts for opposing going into Iraq, or were we?
We should be given chits for visits to the shrink along with the tax forms we receive in the mail, starting with inside the Beltway.