A loyal reader responds to this previous post, asking if anyone in the line of presidential succession could forego a trip to The Wizard for a heart, a brain, or some courage. Presupposing that absolutely all of them have earned a balloon trip back to Auntie Em’s house, let’s take a look …

Sure. Secretary of Transportation. It’s vacant. Perfect.

To borrow the Rumsfeldian style, do we need a president of the US?  No. Would we miss having a Decider, an ultimate place for accountability to stop?  Yes. But is the office superfluous and gorged on its own self-aggrandizement?  Absofrigginlutely.

The presidency was never supposed to be what it is: a megalomonarchy. He’s supposed to be the head of one of 3 separate branches of government. Just the most well-housed wheel in the machine. But Bush is acting like a King, and getting away with it because over the years the government has slowly imploded into its own bloated digestive tract. 

George Washington wasn’t sworn in until April 30 1789, and until then the country hummed along without his ass. We have a legislature and courts, and departments for all sorts of public functions.

Congress has the power to enact laws, not the president. The courts are empowered to enforce the laws, not the president. Congress has the power to declare war, not the president. In fact, the president is empowered to do just about nothing at all that George W. Bush has had his sticky fingers in. 

If We the People decided, in 2008, simply to decline – thank you very much – to elect a president at all, I think the rest of the free world cheer in exalting joy and relief. They would line up to hug us and feed us Belgian Waffles and gooey French cheese and stuff. We would be greeted as liberators!  Especially if, at the same time, we managed to elect a representative government that was expected to work five days a week like the rest of us.