History Lessons - GREAT op-ed on Bush and McCain's wars

[environmentalist]

Written by our managing editor at THE ENVIRONMENTALIST (excerpted by permission):

In her recent speech at the Conference on World Affairs, Rachel Maddow cited James Madison's warning about the unitary executive, the propensity of an unchecked executive branch to lean toward war, whereas the legislature would be more likely to debate the issue before moving toward conflict.

Maddow's supposition, that the Bush administration's seeming incompetence, its torture memos, its rush to war, was by design -- Bush and Cheney's direct effort to shift power to the executive and, thereby, to shift the entire country to a more warlike stance -- does have historical precedence.

I'm not referring to Madison, though he did warn of this, or Jefferson, who raised prescient concern about undue influence, but earlier in history to the systems that Madison and Jefferson used as the inspiration for their grand experiment: The Roman Republic of Caesar's time and the Greek democracy of Solon...

It goes on to cite scary parallels between history and what Bush and McCain have been planning.

Here's the link to the rest of the editorial.