A good word from Gene Lyons

Gene Lyons, as regular readers know, is one of my favorite columnists.  His pre-Christmas piece is one more example why: Police-state methods no answer to terror Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 12/21/05.  Checking in on the latest revelations about the Bush administration extra-legal domestic spying, he writes:

Anybody who rationalizes George W. Bush’s illegal use of secret,  warrantless wiretaps against American citizens is no friend of democracy. They may call themselves “conservatives.” But they might with equal accuracy dub themselves Martians or Zoroastrians. In reality, they are ideologues who place party over country, enemies of the Constitution and its freedoms. There’s evidently no outrage they won’t rationalize so long as a Republican’s doing it. For reasons best left to historians, the Republican right has made itself captive to a brand of callow authoritarianism that’s found its hero in this swaggering mediocrity who appears invariably to draw the wrong lessons from what few scraps of history he knows. The last time no-warrant, presidentially authorized wiretaps came before the Supreme Court was 1972, courtesy of President Richard M. Nixon, who used the FBI to spy on political foes and famously decreed that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” The court voted 8-0 against Nixonian presumption. In his concurring opinion, Justice William O. Douglas quoted his illustrious predecessor, Justice Louis Brandeis : “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.”

He also reminds us of an important aspect of the President's role under the Constitution:

Bush and his legal enablers hold to an extremist interpretation of the “commander-in-chief” clause of the U. S. Constitution that would give him virtually unlimited executive powers in times of war—even a “war on terror,” a metaphorical struggle against an abstract noun which theoretically could go on forever.

It’s an absurd argument. The president commands the armed forces, not the United States. The Founding Fathers meant to assure civilian control of the military, not to establish a wartime strongman.  (my emphasis)

It's a sign of militarization of American politics that the President is so often referred to in a generalized way as the "Commander-in-Chief".  He's the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.  He's not the Commander-in-Chief of any civilian or anyone outside their role as a soldier.

It's not a rhetorical distinction, as Lyons indicates.  It's basic to our democracy.