You Can't?

Bush to Musharraf:

"You can't be the president and the head of the military at the same time," Bush said, describing a 20-minute telephone call with Musharraf.

U.S. Constitution Art. II, sec. 2.:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.

I have no idea what to do about Pakistan, and I don't consider myself a Musharraf shill, so I pose this observation as a question, not a teaching...but I do wonder about the blithe assumption that it's automatically wrong to invoke martial law. Most civilized constitutions make provision for such an eventuality in the case of national crisis, and it seems to me being under attack by the Taliban might constitute such a crisis. Usually there's a provision for restoration of status quo ante as soon as conditions permit. And when did the entire known world become an "expert" on Pakistan fit to comment, I'd like to know?

John Bolton on Hugh Hewitt, sometime in the past few days:

JB: Well, I don’t think it’s anything we should celebrate, of course, but I think we have to be practical about this. This is a regime in control of a number of nuclear weapons, it’s a regime we need to fight the remainder of al Qaeda and Taliban along its border with Afghanistan. And I don’t think we ought to be pushing Musharraf out the door, or necessarily in a direction of coalitions with the likes of Benazir Bhutto, if he thinks it would weaken his position, because the alternative is not a nice Jeffersonian democratic government. The alternative to Musharraf right now is an Islamo-fascist government in control of nuclear weapons, and that’s definitely something to fear.

HH: Is there a danger that Musharraf could become Bush’s Shah or his Diem?

JB: Well, I think that’s entirely possible, and I think part of the reason is the State Department was pushing Benazir Bhutto on him, and I think it was a very foolish strategy, because you can’t say take on some of the democratic opposition and not take on the rest of it. This trying to read internal Pakistani politics is hard for the Pakistanis, let alone for people at the State Department.

Quite.

Update: See?