The Imperial Presidency

Looks like President Obama intends to violate the War Powers Act vis a vis U.S. involvement in the NATO action in Libya.

One more brick in the edifice of the Imperial Presidency. I considered President Bush’s war in Iraq to be reckless, misconceived and ultimately dishonest — but Bush did get congressional authorization for his act.

Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway wrote this week in the Washington Post: "If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate war making."

There you have it. From a Nobel Peace Prize honoree, no less.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

The king of sports?

Let me first acknowledge for the record that I am insanely jealous.

I mean, despite the handicaps of growing up in the SoCal suburbs, I had a great childhood. I got to be a ridge runner in Wrightwood instead of a suburban mall rat. I was a pretty good baseball player and mostly enjoyed it. I played tennis and had a ball collecting bruises in rollerblade hockey. All good. But I really missed out on something in my athletic endeavors.

WHERE WAS LACROSSE?

I would have loved to play lacrosse — loved it. But from the vantage point of ’70s and ’80s Southern California, lacrosse was an old American Indian game or the obscure sport of elite northeastern colleges. Actually, nobody paid any attention to lacrosse at all.

Now it’s all the rage across the West. I hope the Outlaws know how lucky they are. It seems like they do — the sport sure has caught on.

Lacrosse may be the king of sports — along with hockey, which it resembles. It’s fast, it’s rough, it’s got a true American pedigree. Heck, it even played a tactically significant role in a major battle in Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763. How cool is that? (Actually, not so cool for the British garrison of Fort Michilimackinac, but c’est la guerre, you know...).

Now lacrosse is a big deal in Sisters. A really big deal. As in bringing more than 1,000 people to town for a tournament, where they eat, sleep and shop, infusing tens of thousands of dollars into a local economy that can really use the shot in the arm.

Hats off to Bill Rexford and Andrew Gorayeb, to Ryan Moffat of the Sisters Parks and Recreation District and all the others who put together last weekend’s Sisters Annual Lacrosse Invitational (SALI).

This is how Sisters’ signature events — from the quilt show to the folk festival to the rodeo — happen. Individuals with a passion for a sport, an art, a way of life, come together manifest something that benefits the broader community.

And for all of us pining away on the sidelines, maybe we can get some novice play for creaky middle-aged guys...

Jim Cornelius, Editor

You can run on for a long time...

Justice was a long time coming for Osama bin Laden, but when it came, it came swift and hard, at the hands of elite special operations forces.

It appears that the U.S. put together a nearly perfect operation, following a fragment of intel for years until it paid off with the killing of a mass murderer who sent the world reeling with the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history. (Somehow, it matters a lot that this was done in a toe-to-toe fight, not by an impersonal Hellfire missile strike from a drone. It matters that he knew he was going down.).

As President Obama stated, justice has been served.

It’s probably true that the death of Osama bin Laden is not terribly strategically significant. The strategic picture has shifted over the past decade and most experts doubt that he had much more than a symbolic role to play for most of that decade. Nonetheless, symbols are tremendously important in the psychology of war, especially of the asymmetric kind — and this is a significant symbolic victory, if nothing else.

It’s also true that the execution of a murderer cannot fill the hole left by the deaths he caused. Yet it it is no cold comfort. A thirst for a balancing of the scales, however incomplete, is part of what makes us human. We have an innate, intuitive sense of justice and retribution and there is, for most at any rate, a deep sense of satisfaction in closing the circle, in seeing the man who sowed the wind reap the whirlwind.

The U.S. has taken many a misstep in the war Osama bin Laden declared in 1996, missteps that compromised very real successes in dismantling al Qaeda’s capabilities. We will continue to struggle to extract ourselves from the mire of Iraq and Afghanistan and it is axiomatic that terrorism will always remain a threat.

But in the action of May 1, 2011, the United States — and the civilized world — won a victory worth celebrating. As a friend put it: There’s so many things that we do wrong, so many things that we can do better, but this — this was perfect.

Jim Cornelius, Editor