Coup and Counter-coup

It seems that a Frank Gaffney front organization published an article calling on President Bush to engineer a coup to make himself president for life, while Martin Lewis at the Huffington Post put out the call for General Pace and the Joint Chiefs to engineer a coup against the Bush administration. I'm gonna go way out on a limb and say that neither of these are very good ideas. Meanwhile, Jamie Malanowki's new novel The Coup, involves a more clever (and funnier) method of toppling the incumbent. I do wonder sometimes what would happen if Bush did something really crazy like just call up the Joint Chiefs one day and order a preventive nuclear first strike (all the GOP contenders say it should be considered) on Iran without congressional authorization. Does the military follow that order? Should they? My best understanding is that it's completely within the president's legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that's a pretty disturbing idea.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/08/coup-and-counter-coup/45995/