The media has generally been divided into the "happening now", "what we know" and "this is what this means" camps. Television news and the vast majority of blogs are in the first category. Newspapers and another tranche of the blogosphere form the second. A few; too few; actually take on the task of explaining things in context or exploring the larger implications of events. This used to be the exclusive province of magazines like Time and Newsweek, but they squandered their credibility with partisan spin-doctoring and no longer have the resources to do the research that results in a truly useful insight.

What has taken their place is a small coterie of blogs and websites authored by people with an existing expertise in one field or another. The Volokh Conspiracy is one of them. It's generally a legal blog, but written so that lay people can grasp the concepts.

This comment on Congress's flaccid response to the U.S. involvement in the Libyan conflict was like a good steak--meaty and juicy.

President Obama is following a long line of precedents in which the executive lanched a foreign war without congressional authorization. The president disavowed these precedents during his campaign; he may or may not attempt to distinguish his campaign statement by invoking the UN security council resolution authorizing the attack, as Truman did for Korea. But this legal wrangling is all superstructure. Congress is disabled in numerous ways from making practical contributions to a war effort. It cannot prevent the president from starting a war, and it is nearly impossible to halt an ongoing war. Wars, then, simply become an opportunity for members of Congress to stake their reputations as hawks or doves for the sake of future elections.

The essential truth of this resonates when you read it and explains such interesting phenomena as Senators who were for the war before they were against it.

It is an awesome power the President has to unleash the American military machine, larger and more powerful that all of the world's militaries combined, and unusual as well in a Republic built on notions of separation of powers. There are effectively no checks and balances to restrain an American President from letting loose the dogs of war. That has some positive elements, in that it allows the country to react swiftly, when we have a decisive President, to rapidly unfolding events, but the downside is just as obvious.

Much of the current polarization of the American electorate, while not motivated by war, definitely owes it's superstructure to the demagoguery surrounding the Iraq and to a lesser extent, the Afghanistan war. MoveOn.org was created in response to the Clinton impeachment trials, but survived as a useful platform for further left-wing activism. Iraq produced a variety of similar activist groups that can and no doubt will serve for other purposes into the future. On the right, the Tea Party is a powerful organizing force among citizens up in arms about the fiscal mismanagement of the country. While everyone 'likes' their empowering institutions, few give thought to the logical end of the process. When 'mobs' proliferate, mob war is inevitable.

Years ago, I read Lee Iaccoca's book about the resurrection of Chrysler. You may not recall that at the end of the 1970s, Chrysler was about the become another historical relic of the automobile industry to join Hudson, Studebaker and many others. Iaccoca engineered it's rise from the ashes to become one of most successful of the 'big three'. Iaccoca did something very interesting--he gave the unions seats on the board under the premise that having a stake in the future of the company would make them partners rather than adversaries. It seems to me that we can learn something from that.

Congress's irrelevance allows them all sorts of opportunities to create mischief, and quite frankly, demands it in the context of its political reality. Democracy itself is essentially a recognition that distributed power brings lasting peace, as opposed to beleaguered and paranoid dictatorship (see Khadafy...). Why not recognize and apply that knowledge in the world's most successful democracy?

The administration was able to consult with the Arab League and the UN; why not with a standing congressional committee formed specifically to consider matters of military intervention in cooperation with the Executive Branch? Oh wait--these committees already exist!

Once again, the amateur President has sowed the wind and is reaping the whirlwind. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are irresponsibly posturing on the Libyan intervention because they have NO responsibility for the decision.

Democracy works Mr. President. You should try it sometime.