Ruminations

It would seem that I am running rather low on inspiration today. I could hold forth on history, or current events, or my problems, or I could just link to somebody else's work.
As it is,
I would like to speak of my earliest political memory. I was 4, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing here in the US. as a child, I found the name most amusing; how could a gate be made of water? I imagined a doorway guarded by a cascading waterfall shut off to allow passage to those able to enter. In no small wise was the childish conception correct. The Emperor Nixon, his sycophants, and the Washington establishment had by that time, so enmeshed their thinking on the concept that the executive is the physical embodiment of the law, and therefore, no act on the part of the executive can be unlawful, as the acts of the executive are the ultimate definition of the law in practice. And despite the pious displays of furor and mock disgust on the part of the Emperor's political enemies, and many of the commons, the American people were by this time so enervated, so bereft of the moral rectitude of their forefathers, that even in their efforts to thwart tyranny, they abetted it, in the formulation of the War Powers Act; Perhaps the most disingenuous piece of legislation formed up until the Patriot Act. This mendacious law, formulated by men either wholly bereft of common sense, or of human decency, purports to constrain the executive by giving him full license and authority to commit the military of the US to any conflict he sees fit, where he sees fit, as he sees fit, and must simply apply to congress for approval and extension of the adventure within 90 days of its instigation. It is well known that one never attacks a king when he is in the field, and so at all times since the law has been used as a cynical tool of the executive branch to distract the media, discipline the congress, and control the people through the prosecution of elective military adventure. The failed 2-party system does nothing to correct this behavior, ans neither party wishes to revoke the powers or privileges of the executive, desirous as they are for the power of that office themselves, they in turn wish to ever expand and aggrandize its perogatives.
"and these false speeches, having seized the acropolis of the young man's soul, will make him prone to extremes of passion, eventually placing him under the tyranny of his most powerful desires"