[Guillermo]

I don't give the media as much credit for swaying elections as most do around here.

I think America would appreciate a President who stands firmly on convictions and avoids expediency.

Great men are never ones to stick a wet finger in the wind and govern from there. That's why Clinton is rapidly headed to the bottom of the Presidential barrel.

Great men take risks, and tough stances. Taking those risks often involve risking re_election.

Now, Bush did take a huge risk in Iraq, and it will take years to see if it paid off, and he will be judged by history largely in part of what happens there.

Maybe we should go to a one-term limit for Presidents, and term limit Congress, so they will be less apt to act expeditiously.

Machiavelli was right about Democracy. It's a gargantuan monster.

[Southack]

"Great men are never ones to stick a wet finger in the wind and govern from there. That's why Clinton is rapidly headed to the bottom of the Presidential barrel."

Bush didn't do what was popular when he killed the ICC, killed the CCCP - U.S. ABM treaty, killed Kyoto, went into Iraq, or banned some research with human stem cells.

But the public has come around to most of those positions, and history will judge him for standing by his convictions, and rightly so.

Signing CFR should have been a no-brainer. It was illegal on its face, and the Supreme Court would veto it.

Who knew that the SCOTUS would suddenly decide to play politics themselves by ignoring the Constitution and ruling CFR legal?!

We should have gotten a formal ruling on the legality before that bill became law; it would have changed the process and would have forced the SCOTUS to say up front that they were going to toss it (the political angle would have been dead for them had we asked for an advance ruling).

So on that single issue, CFR, Bush was too clever by half. He could have gotten *everything* that he wanted had the SCOTUS simply ruled the way that they were legally and ethically bound to rule, rather than the backstabbing, unconsitution way that they ruled in the end.

Certainly, had the SCOTUS said that they would have approved CFR prior to the bill being voted on, things would have turned out differently.

It should have been a throw-away law; good for short-term political grandstanding, yet tossed by the SCOTUS.

What a pity that we can't predict *how* our judges are going to rule on our very laws...

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires