For several years I considered George Will one of the best political thinkers and writers of our time. Intelligent, witty, articulate, he was a great voice for conservative thinkers in this country. Sadly, during the last couple of years of the Bush Administration, he seemed to lose his way. He all but endorsed Barrack Obama for President and earned the enmity of conservatives and many Republicans.

I understand that Will opposed the Iraq War and why, although I disagreed vehemently with him then and still think that he was wrong. I won’t start that debate again since that’s not the point of this post.

What this post is about is Will’s discovery that lawyer, Constitutional lecturer, and now President Barrack Obama seems to consider the Constitution and the rule of law as mere inconveniences to be ignored as he seeks to fix the problems the country faces.

In Tincture of Lawlessness, Will writes,

Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil — the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.

As with other Obama supporters, Will realizes that Obama not only meant what he said during the campaign, he and the members of his administration have adopted a “the ends justify the means” as well as naked pay back to his union supporters approach to the recession.

I have no doubt that Will knows, as do many others, that at some point some people are not going to be cowed into going along with the blatantly illegal actions of this administration. The problem is that the glacial like pace of the federal court system all but ensures that it will be well after the 2012 elections before courts have declared the illegal moves illegal and provided relief. This plus the thug like approach that Obama, his administration, and many of his far left supporters have taken will do damage, some of it irreparable, to the financial and legal structures of this country. Mob rule is now the predominant method of getting things done.

The same fawning media that proclaimed many of Pres. George Bush’s acts “illegal” when they were in fact upheld by federal courts, say not a word about the activities of Pres. Obama. Where are the leaks, the scandal laced stories, the outrage that were expressed at the activities of the Bush Administration?

Yeah, I thought so.

Will has realized, as many of us feared before the election, that this President wants to eliminate the representative republic form of government that has allowed this country and it’s people to prosper and replace it with government by fiat of the President.

The rule of law, imperfect though it may be, is what allows the putatively powerless to seek and receive redress from grievances and wrongs inflicted upon them by the powerful. If a law or contract is not worth the paper it is written on, then this nation will not last long because like a building with a rotten foundation, it has nothing upon which to stand.

Hopefully others who in their frustration with the Bush Administration and dislike of John McCain forgot their principals will wake up and start to speak out against what is happening.