I read them both, Justin, and I take your points. The ramble was interesting, too. :)

Regarding whether the President lied to the people: I think he was told what he wanted to hear, and he based his public remarks on what he was told. I'm not sure whether his advisors believed what they told him -- I get the feeling of public masks when I listen to them.

I'm not sure which upsets me more: outright lying, or wishful thinking. Outright lying is lying, after all. To lie on such an issue, which decided support for the war for very many people, is despicable, but it's the kind of realpolitick that I can understand. Wishful thinking is just scary. It's careless and childish. It's mistaking what one wants to be for what is. "Toto, I don't think we're in Texas anymore." But the ruby slippers don't work the same in the White House as they do in Emerald City.

On the whole, I rather hope we're dealing with liars, and not people who could get something so important so wrong. It's a hardball vs. bubbles kind of thing. I fear we have bubbles.

Re: the subject line, and why I can't cheer for this:

I've always been a "by the book" kind of girl. I have preferred to work within the rules when I can, and only to break them in the most public and least harmful way to call attention to their need of repair or addition. When people break the rules because they "know better than me", I immediately become uneasy and suspicious.

Look around the world. The United States is the oldest continuing self-governing democratically-elected republic in the world. It is the only successful multicultural republic that has lasted this long without falling into, shall we say, non-democratic political forms to hold it together as a state. Why? Because we are a nation of laws. When our ever-present internal tensions heat up to a ferocious level, there are always those who return to the book, and seek the solution to the current problem there. Either the book has something in it that its genius renders flexible enough to fit the present crisis, or the book provides us with method to compromise and amend, thus making the book our authority once more.

When there's a problem with the law, the only good reason to break it is to demonstrate the need to change it, that is, using civil disobedience deliberately to provoke debate that in turn leads to reinterpretation, amendment, or both. The book -- the rules -- the law -- is what holds us together. Not culture, not aristocracy, not tradition, not even language, and certainly not mutual respect shared equally among us. We have a contract.

The world is starting to move down the path of federal authority and multicultural community. It's a lot different from the path taken by the United States, as we accreted a little less than half of a continent, but the thought behind it is the same. We know this because we started this process ourselves, in typical US fashion not completed on the first pass: first with the League of Nations, and then with the United Nations.

(This, incidentally, is one reason why Islamic radicals find the international community so loathesome: they sense, on some level, that if this trend continues, they will lose their dominance in the region they inhabit. Federalism by its nature allows everyone to live, but provides tools to keep one group from inflicting its whole will on all the others. If the people in Moslem nations own and learn how to use such tools, the days of the extremist imams and their armed friends are numbered. They believe that God will not be served by this outcome, which makes them that much more dangerous.)

One of the things about taking the path toward a federalist world is, there has to be a book, and it has to be written through some sort of concensus. So far, what we have is the body of international law. As has been pointed out here a hundred times, the nations of the world are not all governed by nice people, and the body of international law, both in structure and in application, has suffered because of this. Yet it is the only thing we have that sets us on the path we seek.

To apply it only as it is convenient for us is to undermine its structure even further. Without this structure, we are left with the Roman model, in which a muticultural state is formed by a republic, but governed by force rather than consent. Ultimately, this governmental model corrupts the home government, both by its example and by the demands placed on it for military purposes. (The military, as I'm sure you've noticed, is not a democratic institution, regardless of the government it serves.)

The ends never justify the means. Not least because we can never predict what the ends will actually be. But most, because our society will never survive if we disregard our book, and an international society will never be formed if we disregard the basis for the book that will be the basis of the contract for the world's citizens.

Regards--
Mary Anne