Those were the famous last words on the Constitution from the lips of the Honorable George W. Bush in summation of his opinion of the law of the land.

Steven Colbert had an outrageous segment of ‘Wag the Finger’ on ‘The Colbert Report’ today. It consisted of Rush Limbaugh’s recent address to CPAC, in which Limbaugh quoted the preamble of ‘the Constitution’s’ statement on ‘Life, Liberty, Freedom (sic), and the pursuit of happiness. Colbert then rightly pointed out that this quote is not, in fact from the Constitution, but from the Declaration of Independence.

There seems to be a serious disconnect between politicians, politicos, and pundits everywhere about what the law of the land actually states… other than among the fundamentalists who believe it sounds an awful lot like the Ten Commandments, carried, of course, on the shoulders of the late Charleton Heston, a.k.a, Moses, a.k.a Mr. Past President of the NRA.

In a nation of laws, the disturbing trend of ‘making it up as you go along,’ is almost as bad as the Legislative and Executive branches willingness to throw taxpayer’s money at a problem and ‘see if it floats,’ with little if any oversight. Of course this trend is nothing new, as the following analysis on domestic intelligence and torture from the Bush administration demonstrates, courtesy of the VVAWnet:

“The documents currently being released by the Justice Department that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.

“The first seven of these official memorandums issued last week dealt with claimed presidential powers to unilaterally abrogate international treaties; suspend constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press; and order warrant-less searches, wiretaps and seizures of documents and indefinite imprisonment inside the U.S. without trial or criminal charges. The memorandums claimed that Congress has no overriding authority in these matters.

“The authors of all but one of these documents were John Yoo and Jay Bybee (both then of the Justice Department but now, respectively, a member of the University of California at Berkeley Law School faculty and a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). They were also the authors early in the Bush administration of two special memorandums defining torture much more narrowly than in the United States code of military justice or U.S. civil law.

“They redefined torture to permit what ordinarily is illegal in U.S. military and civil law under the so-called Federal Maiming Statute. This law makes it a crime to disfigure faces and body parts with knives or razors, or to cause blindness, or cut out tongues, or perform other grotesque and gruesome tortures that this column will leave to the consciences of professor Yoo, Judge Bybee and the senior members of the Bush administration who wished to be advised on their exemption from such legal limits.

“The final thing I will say about this is that many or most of the documents now being issued on how President Bush might ignore the U.S. Constitution had to do with domestic surveillance and the (illegal) use of American military forces against the American public.

“That probably would have begun in a small way. “Troublemakers” disappearing here and there. Protest groups rounded up and sent to camps. Possibly a day would have come when some conference of lawyers, or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or Americans for Democratic Action, or the Cato Institute, or some political pressure group like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, did something that seriously annoyed the White House.

“…If a battalion of military police took over the hall and the participants “disappeared,” it would certainly have made the newspapers, if the newspapers still reported such things. But considering the precedent of the American popular reaction to torture, what else would have happened? Possibly there would have been a popular new television program about the subversive forces at work in America, and how patriots should deal with them.”

Full story link: www.williampfaff.com.

This could be Rush’s next TV show… the last one bombed so badly, a hour long Cop- style reality show based on liberal bashing should go over great… Oh! Wait, they already have Fox News.