On January 20^th last year, George W. Bush put his left hand on a Bible, raised his right hand, and, repeating after Chief Justice Rehnquist, spoke the following words:

I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.

We know now that he didn’t mean it. By that time, he had already decided that Constitutional guarantees like search warrants and due process of law are outdated and meaningless in our present time of peril.

The presidential oath of office is specified in the obsolete Constitution itself, so Bush probably didn’t feel much of a twinge of conscience in just mouthing the words last January.

The Constitution was written quite a long time ago — more than two hundred years ago, in fact. As we’ve all learned from listening to countless memoirists, the past was a more innocent time. Two-hundred-plus years ago must have been a really, really innocent time. There’s no way the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen that a day would come when this country would confront bad people who want to hurt us. Bills of Rights, limited powers, judicial review, check and balances all may have made sense in the halcyon agrarian world of the Founders, but times have changed, and we understand the world so much better these days than the simple folk who wrote the Constitution ever could have. They never met Osama bin Laden, so they gave us a president, not a king. George W. Bush is fixing that, now, just as fast as he can.

Still, I can’t help wishing that the framers of the Constitution had been men with vision and foresight. I can’t help wishing they had understood the dynamics of power as well as — heck, even better than — we do now. I can’t help wishing they had written a Constitution that could stand the test of time — a Constitution that could withstand even the death of 3,000 civilians in a vile sneak attack by a murderous enemy. I even wish — do I dare even think it? — that they had given us a Constitution that could withstand a rotten power-grubbing president who wanted to be a king.