Signing Statements - Bush Vs Caesar

Take just a moment to note these important stories of today:

Specter Prepping Bill to Sue Bush
"Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds."

An Imminent Threat (to the Constitution)
A blistering report out today from a blue-ribbon legal panel dramatically establishes how President Bush's use of signing statements to assert his right to ignore legislation passed by Congress undermines the rule of law and the constitutional system of separation of powers.

Lawyers pull Bush up for bypassing laws
US President George Bush should stop issuing statements claiming the power to bypass parts of laws he had signed, a practice that violated the constitution, an American Bar Association task force says in a report released yesterday.

Now take a look at this comparision of two recent books:

The Sons of Caesar: Imperial Rome's First Dynasty (Hardcover) by Philip Matyszak. Publishers Weekly says: "When Rome became a republic in 509 BC, its citizens so deplored the idea of monarchy they would not even allow a foreign king into the city. Despite such thinking, the Republic's institutions were vulnerable to the power, money and influence of its aristocracy." Book Description: This engaging new study reviews the long history of the Julian and Claudian families in the Roman Republic and the social and political background of Rome. At the heart of the account are the lives of six men-Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero-men who mastered Rome and then changed it from a democracy to a personal possession. Author says: "It is no easy thing to overthrow a democracy and harder yet to replace it with an autocracy." Yet the author goes on to describe a century in which such an overthrow occurred, transforming Rome from a Republic to a private family possession.

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Paperback) by Kevin Phillips. Amazon.com says: Paraphrasing a passage from Machiavelli's The Prince, Kevin Phillips writes, "a ruler can ignore the mob and devote himself to the interests of the ruling class, gulling the inert majority who constitute the ruled." Phillips traces the rise of the Bush family from investment banking elites to political power brokers, using their Ivy League network, vast wealth, and questionable political maneuvering to obtain the White House and consequently, shake the foundation of constitutional American democracy. Citing the Bush family mainstays of finance, energy (oil), the military industrial complex, and national security and intelligence (the CIA), Phillips uses copious examples to show the dangerous alliance between the Bushes' business interests (huge corporations such as Enron and Haliburton) and the formation of national policy. No other family, Phillips says, that has fulfilled its presidential aspirations has been so involved in the ascendancy of the arms industry and of the 21st-century American imperium--often at the expense of regional and world peace and for their personal gain."

I ask of you: Can you NOT see the pattern? Do we have to go through ALL that nonsense again? All that lying, stealing and murdering, with all the pain and suffering that goes with it? Have we learned nothing from history? Obviously not. Even though we know, or should know, how it turned out.

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history
that man can never learn anything from history."
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

And all I can offer is our "Fighting To Survive and the "November Will Be Too Late commentaries. Sigh!

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© 2006 by Edward Ulysses Cate
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