I'm not completely fond of FDR, so you don't have to convince me of anything.
Lincoln was at least in the middle of a war on national soil. I'm willing to cut someone slack who is fighting a true war in the middle of the country, not to mention a Civil War, which can be particularly nasty. I mean it even says in the Constitution he can suspend habeas corpus rights during war time among all kinds of other things. On a scale of 1 to 10 on how much freedom the Constitution granted him to do normally unconstitutional things he was somewhere between an 8-10. The Framers built in these provisions to accommodate for a war on American soil on the scale of the Civil War or something comparable.
Bush read these provision way too broadly. He used the "war on terror" as a cloak to do way too many questionable things completely behind the back of the rest of the government, particularly the judicial branch. I'm not saying that the commander in chief isn't entitled to use that power, but there are appropriate times and appropriate ways to use that power. The times did grant Bush some discretion to tap into that power, but the way he did it was completely unreasonable and as the Supreme Court declared with respect to his treatment of the detainees unconstitutional.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
