Responsibility for delegated authority.*

I'm a big fan to the Constitution (right up there on my list of favorite documents ever). But despite all of the wisdom encased in that document it fails on one serious point. That is providing a clear job definition of the work that the vice president should do.

The original document stated that the vice president should be the person who came in second in the general election (which honestly makes impeaching the president so much more appealing). The 12th amendment changed the manner by which we elect vice presidents but the document as a whole leaves very little clarity on what the office is responsible for.

I don't have a problem with the fact that the President has delegated significant amounts of power to the VP. In his own way Cheney is a very capable administrator with a lifetime of Washington experience.

The problem is who do you assign blame to when he does something wrong. As obscene as it seems the office of the VP is not a normal cabinet office. He is an elected official and serves at the will of the people. Everyone else is nominated and approved by the Senate and serves at the pleasure of the President.

The motion to defend the office of the vice president as part of the executive branch is indeed theater and is in my opinion low theater. As a matter of tradition the VP is a member of the executive branch. If he is breaking the rules, congress shouldn't act like an unhappy parent and withhold his allowance. They should follow the steps that are granted them in the Constitution. That is impeach him.

The hard part is deciding who to impeach. Do you impeach the President for poor delegation or do you impeach the Vice President for breaking the laws that he was given to enforce.

I say impeach them both. The vice president has broken laws and ignored the constitution. He has abused the trust of the American people and it should not be permitted.

However, to return to my previous point, the job of VP is not defined beyond Senate tie breaker and presidential understudy. Therefore any additional power that he holds is delegated from the President. As we say in the military you can delegate authority but never responsibility. The president of the United States has granted incredible power to the VP. Failure to ensure that that power is used correctly leaves him just as guilty.

*This post was originally posted here as a comment.

On "International Forces"

Last night we were watching the Colbert Report interview with Tom Hayden. During the interview Mr. Hayden said something that really annoys me. He commented that we needed to get U.S. troops out of Iraq and bring in an international peace keeping force to replace us.

We really need to stop giving people who use this buzz phrase the time of day. Any foreign government who is willing to contribute troops to the stabilization of Iraq has already contributed. I don't see the French, Germans, or Russians diving in when the most capable military in the world calls it quits. In most cases our current allies are maxed out on their military commitment. Most of the governments that are supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom are already hearing cries from their home governments to pull troops out of Iraq (just like the United States).

Even if there were governments who were willing to contribute if asked nicely. Not a one of them could hope to front the number of troops that it would take to get the job done. There are an estimated 135,000 American troops in Iraq. With additional coalition forces the total rises to 150,000 troops. Numbers like this are not possible without the United States.

So please, when someone tells you that we need to get out and bring in international troops. Tell them to please start thinking before they open their mouths.

I haven't had time to watch the entire Republican Debate, but I've read several things about and watched the above video.

I haven't made up my mind on Ron Paul but I think he has the tip of a great observation. That is that American policy over the past 50 years has caused people to in the Middle East to hate us. I don't think he had time to fully articulate it in 60 seconds.

It is certainly true that the core of the Al Quiada operation hates us completely. It is very much an irrational hate, and something that no amount of policy changes will resolve. You can find philosophical underpinnings of this movement in Qutb's book Milestones. The people who subscribe to this point of view are the people willing to commit suicide in the hopes to do us harm. These are the people that we must hunt down and remove from circulation.

The most of the people in the Muslim world are most likely not willing to engage in actual conflict with the United States. However many Muslims do dislike us for a variety of reasons. If the United States made an honest effort to understand these reasons and apply them to our foreign policy the world would be a safer place. It is also easy for a real terrorist to hide among people who just dislike the United States. If the United States followed a foreign policy was realistic in addressing the dislikes of the worlds Muslim population, terrorists would loose supporters, recruits and a population to hide among. It is possible that if we had done this sooner 9/11 may not have occurred. Ultimately there is no way to tell. Hopefully we can try it now and see it help prevent the next attack.

McCain, rebranding himself as the Obama of the right.

ABC News reports that McCain is attempting to relaunch himself and his campaign.

He did so by trying to cast himself as an independent conservative appealing to not just Republicans, but the nation.

"Ours are not red state or blue state problems," McCain said before a crowd of approximately 300 well-wishers underneath an overcast sky. "We can't muddle through the next four years, bickering among ourselves, and leave to others the work that is ours to do."

Honestly it sounds allot like he is trying to pick up Obama's with a Republican twist. "Ours are not red state or blue state problems..." sounds like it is lifted almost directly from Obama's speech at the Democratic convention.

To bad he surrendered credibility by pandering to social conservatives and overplaying the security situation in Iraq.

Casey's Two Brigades

NPR reports that Gen. George Casey testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he only asked the President for two Brigades to help secure Baghdad rather than the 5 the current surge strategy calls for.

I want to believe that this is what he called for, but it brings up several questions. One is that feasible, or does it indicate a lack of judgment? Two is this a political move to back the President. If it is there are two ways that the statement can play.

1. The president is sending more troops then were asked for. Sending more troops is a sign of commitment to create peace in Iraq. It also shows that he is a strong leader and shouldn't be criticized for not sending enough troops.

2. Holding to the logic of the first point the statement by Casey gives the president wiggle room. If the Generals say that 2 brigades can get the job done then the President can back down based on publicly announced expert advice.

I'm no general and I don't know how many brigades it will take to secure Baghdad and Anbar. However the president has always said that gives the Generals what they want. It strikes me as strange when the American people don't agree with the decision is when he has given more then they asked for.

I find the most recent email from Sam Harris to Andrew Sullivan to be quite interesting because I think they are both advocating the same point. It is the height of fundamentalism to apply knowledge, religious or secular to the wrong sphere. Religion is the search for answers that cannot be known. Science is the search to understand all that is knowable about our world. The domains of these two types of knowledge have changed drastically in the past several centuries. Science has made great gains and the mystery of the physical world has been greatly reduced. Also we can see what things are within the bounds of science but we do not yet have the answers for. Responsible religion would recognize this and seed, happily, that these things are no longer within the domain of religion.

This however does not mean that the religious myths loose value. Myth is not about logical truth, it is about explaining the things we cannot know. To use creation myth as an example. The book of Genesis states that God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th. Now modern science can tell us with some certainty how the universe was formed, how stars were born and how this very planet grew and developed. The presence of the logos based explanation does not remove the need for Genesis completely. It removes the need to use Genesis as an explanation of how, but not the why.

The religious fundamentalist will persist that Genesis is a complete explanation of how and why. The secular fundamentalist insists that because he can explain how there is no greater why. The rational person accepts the scientific how, and may choose to believe a religious explanation for why in order to enrich his feeling of identity.

Genesis is a simple case, because the origins of the planet can be scientifically determined. The life of Christ is more complex. We have no reference to his life outside to the Gospels, which makes determining truth, as Sam Harris uses the word, impossible. Furthermore all normal evidence shows that the virgin birth, resurrection, and assumption into heaven are untrue. To claim in the empirical sense that they are would be bad science. That does not prevent you from having a religious discourse about what those stories make you think about the world, and how what they make you think should effect how you act in the world.