The past is epilogue

The one bit of actual news in George Bush's erratic press conference today was his explicit statement that it would be unpatriotic for Congress not to fund his deployment of troops in Iraq, despite the earlier agreement of the reactionary legal scholars around him that withholding funding is a key instrument of Congress in power disputes with the President. One can pick historical analogies ad infinitum with this crowd, but not a bad one would be to note that the US constitutional system is at about the state of England in the Second Barons' War. That would be 1264 AD.