Posted on 06/25/2005 1:20:42 AM PDT by Destro
Bush and Putin -- For Life?
by William Norman Grigg
June 25, 2005
After President George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin in 2001, he described looking into the "soul" of his Russian counterpart and deciding that he could "trust" the ex-KGB officer.
In the years that followed, the Bush administration has occasionally tweaked Putin for his increasingly dictatorial ruling style – for instance, his regime’s ongoing intimidation of relatively independent media and political dissidents, and the ongoing centralization of power in Putin’s office.
To that list can now be added a proposal that the Russian constitution be changed to permit Putin to run for a third term – meaning, in principle, that he could become the nation’s president-for-life.
Reported Newsday on June 24: "A senior member of [Putin’s] United Russia party … submitted a legislative amendment Thursday that would allow Putin to stand for re-election if he stepped down before the end of his second term … in March 2008, and if the next presidential poll held without his participation is declared invalid – for example, because of low turnout."
Speculation abounds in Russia "that Putin would seek to stay in power beyond 2008," continued the report. "The 52-year-old former secret service chief, hand-picked to succeed former President Boris Yeltsin, has been highly popular since he was first elected in 2000." Like George W. Bush, Putin’s popularity derives from his image as a steel-spined defender of the homeland against radical Islamic terrorists – in Putin’s case, the al-Qaeda-backed terrorists responsible for a series of bombings in Russia in 2000 and last year’s atrocity in Beslan.
It would seem that the proposed Russian constitutional amendment – which, again, is not directly connected to Putin – would typify the behavior Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describes as "democratic backsliding." However, the same charge could just as easily be laid at the feet of President Bush and his supporters.
Last February, five Republican congressmen introduced House Joint Resolution 24, "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the 22nd amendment to the Constitution." The 22nd Amendment, limiting U.S. presidents to two full terms (or ten years’ total service in the office), was enacted in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s four-term presidency.
The proposed constitutional amendment offers none of the qualifying clauses present in the Russian proposal. If approved by Congress, and ratified by legislatures of three-fourths of the states before 2008, George W. Bush would be permitted to run for a third term – and perhaps a fourth, and a fifth….
During last year’s presidential election, some GOP-aligned talk radio pundits – as well as Zell Miller, the Democratic Senator from Georgia who offered the keynote address at the 2004 GOP National Convention – intimated that there was something improper and subtly seditious about seeking to unseat an incumbent president "in time of war."
As a model of "patriotic" bi-partisanship, Sen. Miller invoked the example of 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie, who offered no criticism of FDR’s thinly disguised drive to involve our country in WWII. Miller, of course, did not mention the fact that Wilkie, a Democrat until shortly before he was selected to run against FDR, almost certainly "threw" the election on FDR’s behalf.
At present, there's no Democratic equivalent of Wilkie on the horizon, should the 22nd Amendment be repealed and Mr. Bush decide to emulate FDR's example. But given the temptation to preserve the power of presidential incumbency, and the rate at which Mr. Bush and his supporters are centralizing power in the executive branch and the GOP leadership, it's not unreasonable to worry that repeal of the two-term presidential limit would effectively make George W. Bush our president for life.
This is 100% bunk and you know it
How many times would we have kept voting for Reagan?
A third term would have come easy, how about a fourth?
While he didn't come out with his Alzheimer's until 1994, had he remained President into the early 90s his decision making may have been compromised by that brutal disease.
Roosevelt breaking Washington's precedent was improper as well.
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