The outgoing President has taken a lot of shots, some plausible but many preposterous. Madden notes that the claim that Bush has turned himself into a kind of American Augustus is historically naive: “Claiming that President Bush or any other American presidence is a new Pompey or Augustus is simply the kind of frivolousness to be expected in a time of Pax. It sells books and makes for good talk-show fodder, but it is historically absurd. The men who overturned the Roman Republic did so by wielding raw military power against their own government. Sending the armed forces to Iraq (after a supporting congressional resolution) is one thing, sending them to Washington, D.C., is quite another.”
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