In the heat and rhetoric of the oncoming election, it's all too easy to forget what it's all really about. To help ground us all, I think linking Wikipedia's superb summary of the US Constitution is extremely appropriate. The history section should also be of interest to any Iraqi readers we might have, and US readers who are concerned about that country. In spite of appearances to the contrary we all learned in grade school, the process of creating our own constitution was at best messy, at worst an outright brawl, that took years. Even then it was a fundamentally and nearly fatally flawed document that required a war which scythed away essentially an entire generation before its own internal contradictions were resolved.

Everyone, especially in Europe, remarks about how young a country the US is, as if this somehow makes the wealth and power we have accrued somehow ill-gotten. Yet nearly everyone forgets one simple fact:

The Constitution of the United States is ... the oldest written national constitution still in force.

We are also the oldest federal republic by far, and have had a functioning representational democracy longer than any country on the planet. Our power is not a coincidence, our wealth did not simply decend from heaven. Both were hard won, at a cost horrifyingly dear, and at no point was either ever a foregone conclusion. We've come a long way, indeed.