Go team!

It is often with a great sense of irony that an American, who is interested, will find his nation's history. At the present time, days before the 2006 mid-term elections, the national mood of the United States is a seething contempt for the current regime, which is a republican Senate, House and President.

The nearly four year old "war" in Iraq has degenerated into…a war. Exactly what war was supposed to look like prior to our invasion of Mesopotamia is anyone's guess. The American public however is a fickle lot and with the epidemic of attention deficit disorder plaguing a fairly large segment, it's no wonder that Americans have become somewhat disheartened by our lack of a clear cut football-esque type victory over the desert tribes, although our aim was never to battle them, only their despotic regime.

So to set the stage for those who may read this at some point in the future I will describe the teams as they now sit. As was stated previously the republicans maintain majorities in all branches of the government. The democrats need to take fifteen seats in the house to gain a majority and about eight in the Senate. Democrats are charged and republicans are dispirited. All prognostications seem to indicate that democrats will sweep into Washington on a tsunami wave of upheaval.

The current regime has drawn the ire of the American public in a number of ways, foremost of which is a perceived abuse of executive power. I'll use the word perceived for this purpose basically because it all depends on which team you happen to cheer for as to whether you "perceive" the abuse of power or whether you tend to ignore it. If you cheered the republicans at the beginning of this high stakes match you will have a tendency to support all of the invasive measures the president claims to have, such as, warrantless wiretapping of American civilians, suspending habeas corpus, torturing prisoners, and invading foreign countries, just to name a few.

At first a great majority of the country was supportive of these measures because of the hijacked jets that were flown into the World Trade Centers and the pentagon. Overnight the stars and stripes appeared on practically every bumper in America. America was ready for vengeance and George Bush was just the man for the job. The congress unflinchingly passed the Patriot Act into law with most members having never read it. That was the first mistake.

Then the Congress approved giving the president the power to make war on whomever he decided was behind the Trade Center attacks. This was mistake number two.

Without going into an in depth history of the past four years, suffice it to say that after not too long a time the bumper sticker flags went away and people got back to disliking each other. The entire notion that somehow, because the United States was the victim of a terrorist attack, civility would permeate the nation and crime would disappear and everyone would get along forever and ever was an altogether deluded concept in the first place. No, the terrorist attacks did not change the demeanor of the United States, but the Bush administration did.

So now the power grab by the neo-cons, the splendid war that didn't go as planned, the fiasco in New Orleans, and the virtual laundry list of corrupt republican politicians has most of the American public pretty well disgusted, and rightly so.

I want to state clearly that this time it is the democrats who want to limit the power of the executive and it is the republicans that want us to believe the president should be given broad powers, outside the scope of the constitution. It wasn't always like this.

At one time, the folks on the left cheered for dictatorial powers for the president.

"Flynn's prototype American fascist was not a thug in a brownshirt or SS uniform; it was the American statesman who sought to erode the people's power in Congress and to concentrate undue authority in the hands of the President (Roosevelt). Flynn warned against militarism and imperialism; yet his cry for constitutional government was to become purely a rallying cry for the Right-wing in American life. Liberals then defended the tradition of Presidential power, which was conceived as the repository of all virtue in political life. "

When the democrats take back the Congress we'll see if they truly do loathe the new powers of the executive as much as they tell us they do. No, they will quickly adjust to aggressive wars, deficit spending, invasive snooping, and a host of other issues they now find distasteful. And the republican team will suddenly realize that maybe it isn't such a good idea for a president to be able to designate people "enemy combatants" on a whim and that exit strategies actually are necessary when it comes to war. (Like they told us when Clinton went to war in Bosnia.)

Yes the tables will turn and the people who cheer for things now will in the future scream about them. And people who loathe a thing right now will lobby dearly for the same thing later. And people will adjust their "beliefs" to the prevailing wind as necessary and believe the things they need to believe when they need to believe them.