“Wartime president.”

Those words have an amazing power over the American mind it seems. Along with the myth that *we* only go to war for good causes, and invariably in self-defense, we buy into the myth that we must cede greater power than is usually considered to be the norm to The Leader in such times. Because all our experience from childhood on seems to confirm that when you have a big job to do, you need one person to direct things, and for everybody else to do what that person says, or else everybody just runs around higgledy-piggledy or Keystone Kopsishly, getting in each other’s way, whacking each other’s heads with long boards, trying to go through narrow doorways three abreast, and the like.  Read more