Back on March 10 I posted an item about Bush’s March 6 press conference. I’m going to repeat something I said there, and amplify it a bit.

George Paine at Warblogging.com has an excellent rant on how Bush has failed in his promise to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution: The presidential oath. (Nice use of the ‘sieg heil’ photo, btw.)

Anyway, one of the commenters there said this:

Yes, Bush has violated his Oath of Office. Because of poor education, you know the average American does not care.

I think that’s true. And what’s more, I think George Bush himself falls into the category of people so ill-educated that they don’t realize he’s violating his oath of office.

If you go back and watch the March 6 press conference, when he was laying out his reasons for going to war, he made some very revealing comments about what he thinks his job is. At one point, he said:

My job is to protect the American people. It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.

So, therefore, I think the threat is real. And so do a lot of other people in my government. And since I believe the threat is real, and since my most important job is to protect the security of the American people, that’s precisely what we’ll do.

Later, he said:

My job is to protect America, and that is exactly what I’m going to do. People can ascribe all kinds of intentions. I swore to protect and defend the Constitution; that’s what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath, and that’s exactly what I am going to do.

Especially if you watch the video, or listen to the audio, you get a really powerful sense that in Bush’s mind, those two things (protecting the American people, and protecting the Constitution) are absolutely synonymous. He makes no distincation between them whatsoever. He has no conception that on some level the two goals might be in conflict with each other.

But in some cases they clearly are. Presidents are required to make difficult judgements between enhancing security on the one hand, and preserving Constitutional liberties on the other. But with Bush, no judgement is required. In his mind, “protecting the Constitution” (what he actually swore to do) just means “protecting the American people” (as in, protecting them from physical harm). So the Constitution gets shredded on his watch, but he sees absolutely nothing wrong with that. Sweet!

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, September 19th, 2003 at 12:36 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.