What Mid-terms?

Thanks to Matt Stoller at MyDD for bringing my attention to this.

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To the current White House occupants, the mid-term elections were not a democratic means to validate or reject candidates and by implication, the policies they advocate or oppose. Instead, the elections were an obstacle in time, a temporary restraint on the President’s ability to tell the truth and reveal what his intentions were all along.

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The election is over, but it’s results almost don’t matter now. Just as the message before the election was designed to convey the notion that the policy was in support of eventually withdrawing US troops, so the consistent message since the election has been about the need and options for increasing troops and escalating the war. Yet nothing that occurred on the day of, the day before, or the day after the elections changed a single reality in Iraq itself. The election was not a signal that their policy had failed, any more than it was a mandate to withdraw; to this Administration, it was a release from further political constraints. And a plan that could not even be hinted at before is now about to be implemented.

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Short of removal from office, how do you force a willful and deceitful President to stop making war and endangering thousands of people?
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It's amazing to me that this is what's happening and I think the quoted question is a good one. Obviously I don't think there are any grounds for removal in Bush's case, since I don't know that there's any evidence that he's committed any "high crimes and misdemeanors." Also, my understanding of the constitution is consistent with the dismay that the question embodies. Congress can't tell the President what to do on the front lines.

The system was set up that way specifically in response to the Framers' perceived need for the country to speak with one voice when speaking to foreign powers. The President's voice. That we might have a President who can come away from a mid-term election like we had in November and blithely shrug and say "Just try and make me withdraw. Nanny-nanny boo-boo," was something I didn't see coming even from the present administration.