America when it's ugly

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in the International Herald-Tribune that,

The law is the safeguard of liberty, but only as long as it is not twisted beyond all recognition. After all, tyrants have their lawyers just as democracies do. Our founders looked to law as constraint, not as license; as a check on power, not authorization. The difference is a matter of honor, of values, of identity itself.

Understanding and embracing law as a check on our worst instincts, as individuals and as a nation, has a deeper purpose, a moral purpose.

When we ask our soldiers, many still in their teens, to degrade and abuse their fellow human beings, we are degrading them. We are removing the very moral constraints that they take pride in as patriots and that they have learned to live by as part of what it means not just to be a soldier, but to be a U.S. soldier...

The soul of America as a nation depends not on the letter of the law, but on the deeper self-discipline to accept law and live by it as a statement of who we are and who we aspire to be.

Yet under President George W. Bush, who would describe himself as a deeply moral man, who indeed divides the world into good and evil, law has become a prop for power. Unless we as a nation, led by the Senate and by our retired military officers and young captains and cadets, rise up and insist on the constraints of law, America will no longer be so beautiful.