Who runs this country?

It should be the president:

The Constitution is the [social]Contract. It is the highest law of the land. Yet somehow we have allowed the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department to become the fourth and fifth branches of government, respectively; the "Intelligence community" has been allowed to become a KGB-like government in and of itself, answerable to no one. It is time to bring these cowboys back down to Earth, and within the appropriate bounds of Constitutional authority....

The first step is to elect a leader who will take his oath to uphold the Constitution seriously, and who will be willing to take whatever steps necessary to wipe the slate clean in both agencies. The President is entitled to an Intelligence Community that serves solely at the whim of the Executive Branch, and answers to no one else. And in our Constitution, the President IS the Executive Branch, not the CIA or State Department, or any other agency within the Executive bureaucracy with a different agenda. This NIE fiasco, the leaks to the NY Times re: secret terror monitoring methods, the Plame/Wilson joke--all these are little more than bureaucrats trying to sabotage a President. But the threat is not only to the President's authority--during a time of War, the threat is to our very lives. If Iran or its agents detonate a nuke in the US or Isreal (sic)or Europe, and we did nothing to stop it beforehand, all because a ridiculous political NIE was allowed to surface, then whose hands will the blood of the tens of thousands of casualties be on? This is not a game: we are at War and it is our lives and the lives of millions of innocents which are being placed in harm's way by these partisan bureaucrats. Our Intelligence agencies are out of control. It is madness and it is suicidal; and quite frankly, it has to be stopped.

What is needed is to get a President that will "man up" and to do the difficult work of cleaning house in these bureaucracies, before they swallow whole the rest of us. We need to elect someone with the cojones and determination to take on these traitors within, even if it means tearing the agencies down to nothing and starting over again. Because when rogue operatives in our Intelligence community are permitted (and even encouraged by Democrats and the media...) to actively engage in sabotaging a President's ability to function as THE Executive Branch, we no longer have a functioning Executive Branch. And we no longer are living under the social contract of the Constitution.