Glenn Greenwald has been doing more of his uncannily excellent work with a recent piece on the creeping tendency of the media to refer to the President of the United States as the Commander-in-Chief. As Greenwald has noted elsewhere,
while President Bush's supporters are fond of referring to him as the "commander in chief" -- typically to insinuate that he should be beyond criticism or that his authority cannot be questioned, particularly in "times of war" -- the president under our system of government holds that position only with regard to those in the armed forces (see Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: "The president shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States"). With regard to Americans generally, the president is not our "commander" but instead our elected public servant, subject to the mandates of the law like every other citizen and subordinate to the will of the people.
"Commanders" and "chiefs" don't need to have their orders approved by legislatures. Their decisions are not to be questioned by the enlisted men. They give orders and expect them to be obeyed without criticism or explanation. This is an effective way to run the armed forces, but when those expectations cross over into the civilian sphere, the result is tyranny. As noted by Jim Henly, one of the bloggers Greenwald cites:
The President is not “our Commander-in-Chief.” He is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. (You can look it up.) . . . If you ain’t in the uniformed services or the active duty militia, you ain’t got a commander-in-chief.
The rather chilling converse of Henly's comment is that if you believe that the man in the White House is the country's commander-in-chief, then you have taken a giant first step toward legitimizing military dictatorship.
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