It’s not the "City on a Hill" version that Bush espouses (minus the meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality). No, what is truly great about America’s democracy is the system of checks and balances that we memorized in the eighth grade. Sure, it was boring then, but to see it in action – say, smacking down Bush’s belief that he can label someone an “enemy” and throw him in jail without rights – is truly a wonderful thing.

It is America’s rule of law that is worth exporting, not all the other crap. The fact that the Supreme Court’s word is accepted as final, that a president does not change the law to give himself a third term, that political enemies do not murder each other (they just say, “Go fuck yourself”) – these are the things that make a democracy. All of it is based on the rule of law. And the founding fathers, though all male and all white, had the foresight to create a system that even a former alcoholic C student from Texas with a family grudge and not an original thought in his head couldn’t screw up, as hard as he may try:

In the fall of 2001, President Bush justified his decision to treat some captured terrorist suspects as "enemy combatants" without access to lawyers, courts or other long-established legal rights on the grounds that he could not let the United States' "enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself."

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court upended a good-sized chunk of that logic, and offered a powerful reminder that in the United States, even in wartime, no prisoner is ever beneath the law's regard, and no president above its limits.

It was Justice Robert H. Jackson who first noted 52 years ago this month, in another wartime election summer, that a president is not commander in chief of the country, only of the military. Justice Jackson wrote that in his concurring opinion overturning Harry S. Truman's seizure of the American steel industry during the Korean war, and Justice David H. Souter cited those words approvingly in his concurrence on Monday.

The effect of the current court's rulings in two related cases was to place a classic institutional and political check on Mr. Bush's effort to keep some citizens and aliens held as the most dangerous "enemy combatants" from ever having their day in any court. It is precisely the right to some such hearing, the court held, that defines the constitutional separation of powers and by extension the American governing creed. (New York Times)

Bush was wrong when he said, "enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself" - terrorists have destroyed buildings and taken lives, but only we can destroy liberty by allowing fear mongers to tear away at the foundation of America's great promise. This is a strong and resourceful nation - we can protect our shores and our principles, and we should be unwilling to sacrifice one for the other.

Bush's attempt to permanently undermine the democratic rule of law would have been a victory for the enemies of freedom and democracy he invokes so often in his speeches. He failed. Score one for America.