As always, Keith speaks the truth:

…on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

He closes address the President:

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

We have limitations on governmental (and especially executive) power for very good reasons. An excellent rule of thumb when contemplating expansion of those powers it so imagine how someone completely at odds with one’s own political values might utilize such an expansion. The GOP in general and this Administration in particular have completely missed this lesson, and we pray that a wiser Congress may see this folly, and correct this travesty sooner rather than later.