Let’s take this nice and slow. Say we’re both in charge of something, like a nation. We hold co-equal status according to our Constitution. I’m the President and you’re the Congress. Now, say I want to do something that you don’t want me to do. For argument’s sake, let’s say I want to continue a war that you don’t want me to continue.

It might seem easy, if I also hold the title ‘Commander-in-Chief.’ Aha! Well, when it comes to war, I would seem to have the trump card. But, also for the sake of argument, let’s say that I am just about the only person who wants to continue this war. Even my supporters aren’t all that thrilled about my war these days. Counter-balancing my power, you have control of the public purse. hmmmm . . . This is starting to get interesting.

Let’s go even farther: let’s say that all the reasons I gave you for going to war in the first place were wrong. We’re not going to get into whether I lied to you or was given bad intelligence. We’ll just leave it at all the reasons I gave have evaporated into the fog of war. There supposed to be weapons of mass destruction (read: atomic). There were none. There were supposed to be biological weapons. There were none. There supposed to be Al Qaeda training camps run by Saddam Hussein. There were none. There was supposed to be contact between the Iraqis and Mohammed Atta. There was none. There was supposed to be an Al Qaeda presence in Saddam’s Iraq. There was none then, there is one now. The only place where foreign insurgents were known to be before the war was in the north of Iraq, an area controlled by our good friends, the Kurds. (more…)