[Rasorow]

Jack Simth said:

There's a reason I used "government" rather than "ruler", "leader", "president" et cetera. The US president can be removed without assasination precisely because he is a portion of the government, rather than the government itself. Sure, he is capable of doing a lot of evil stuff - nuking half the planet, for instance - without consent of the rest of the government; even if he had the full support of the entire US government, the average joe could still in practice run away from laws that were truely evil (such as mandatory lobotomies for everyone (except those closely related to a government official) with an IQ over 90) as the US does not hold sway over the whole planet.

Sure; of course, checks and balances occasionally break down. Take, for example (a fairly extereme one), Hitler's rise to power. Post WWI Germany was handed a constitution as part of the WWI cleanup (I'm simplifying a lot here). They got an elected body with specific, limited powers, modeled after the British and US system. Their constitution gaurunteed certain rights, which could only be supressed in an emergency by at least a two-thirds majority vote of the elected body with at least two-thirds of that body present. The body was a party-election setup, similar to the British system; that is, the party with X% of the popular vote got X% of the seats.
Then Hitler came along. He was popular; he managed to get something like 45% of the popular vote for his party. Then, one day, it came about that all of his people were present, and enough of the other representatives were gone that there were just barely enough there to qualify for an emergency rights supression vote. Interestingly enough, two-thirds of two-thirds is four-ninths; which is 44%. The vote went along party lines and Hitler was handed the full reins of Germany, with full permission to do whatever he liked.

Without getting into it, there was a lot going on with Hitler.. the basis being the allied powers failed to ensure a prosperous German nation where Hitler would not have been able to succeed as easily as he did or as completely. The fact is the allies created a situation in Germany and then allowed it to deteriate to the point that if Hitler hadn't come along someone like him would have.

Rasorow