Something happened seventy-three years ago today — one of those milestones that’s immediately recognized as an historic event, but whose real significance is not understood until years later.

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, someone set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin, where the German parliament met.

There is a popular myth about the Reichstag fire which is almost certainly untrue: that the Nazis themselves set the fire to clear the path for a Hitler dictatorship. In fact, a mentally disturbed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe probably set the fire, acting on his own. But the Nazis saw the fire as a great opportunity. Using emergency powers, they banned the Communist party, revoked civil liberties and gave Hitler the authority to rule by decree. Once he had that power, he never gave it up. The emergency never ended.

When a court acquitted several Communist party leaders of a role in the fire, Hitler stripped the courts of much of their authority and established a special tribunal called the Volksgerichtshof to handle “political crimes.”

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we all saw historic parallels to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly sixty years earlier. Now, in hindsight, and having witnessed four and a half years of the Bush Administration’s response to those attacks, I think there are lessons to be learned from a different historical parallel.

Don’t forget Pearl Harbor, but do remember the Reichstag fire.

First, I got an email message referring me to this CNN story:

The second in command at the Pentagon said Thursday that people who publicly oppose allowing a Middle Eastern company to take over management of some U.S. ports could be threatening national security.

I shrugged it off. The Bush Administration says stuff like this all the time. In this business, you get a lot of wacky leads. Then came the second email. What it contained was dynamite: a template file that the Administration uses for press releases.

[fill in administration authority name] said on [date of announcement] that people who publicly oppose [fill in administration policy] could be threatening national security.

If my source was right, this meant that a collection of Microsoft Office macros was running the government now. Poorly-coded macros. That would explain a lot of things.

I’ve decided not to reveal the name of the source. It’s much more dramatic that way.

If the source works for the federal government, then this blog post is investigative journalism, and I should be getting packed for prison right now. If not, then this whole story is nothing more than incisive political commentary, and my source and I should expect audits of our income tax returns.

Boy. Investigative journalism sure is exciting.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn’t make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn’t endanger national security. But that’s nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation’s ports.

…

Let’s go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. “Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],” read an aide’s handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. “Hard to get a good case,” the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity … he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn’t.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what’s the difference?

Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that “people don’t need to worry about security.”…

…

[A]fter years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn’t attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can’t suddenly turn around and say, “But these are good Arabs.”

…

But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush’s current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions — a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.

Howard Fineman, on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, on the White House claim that George W. Bush didn’t know about the port management deal until he heard about it from the media:

I think the president has a lot of credibility when he pleads ignorance.

Olbermann, filling in some historical background about relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Osama bin Laden:

Back in February 1999, the CIA had a chance to take out bin Laden at a hunting camp in Afghanistan, but one of the reasons it did not, said [former CIA director George] Tenet, was because bin Laden was visiting with the emiratic princes. To quote Tenet, “You might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I’m sure entered into everybody’s calculations.”

Now I see why Bush wants these guys running our ports. Why, they’re in a perfect position to know bin Laden’s plans. And surely they’ll clue us in just as soon as they can.

Cartoons have been causing such a lot of trouble in recent weeks. Tom Tomorrow confronts the issues.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore has an animated gun safety lesson from Dick Cheney.

Ward Sutton has the vice-president’s official timeline of Quailgate.

Sutton also brings us the Republican Funeral Patrol:

Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Paul Wellstone… it disgraces their memory to speak passionately of their beliefs at their funerals.

Remember when cartoons didn’t make you want to cry?

Come to think of it, I don't think it’s the cartoons doing that.

The veto is one of the president’s most important powers. Unlike wiretapping without a warrant or indefinite detention without charges or trial, this power is actually given to the president by the U.S. Constitution.

George W. Bush is the first president since James A. Garfield never to use the veto. (Garfield was shot a few months after taking office.)

Bush has threatened to use the veto a few times, and it’s instructive to see what issues stir him up enough to reach for the veto pen.

For example, he threatened to veto any law that included the anti-torture language put forth by John McCain, a Republican senator who knew something about torture because he had been a POW in the Vietnam War. After McCain’s language was approved by about 90 percent of both houses of Congress — enough to override a veto — Bush signed it into law, tacking on a “signing statement” that said essentially that he didn’t have to obey the law if he didn’t feel like it.

And now he’s threatening to veto any attempt by Congress to block the turnover of operations of six eastern U.S. ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. His Treasury Secretary, John Snow, who had business dealings with the company before joining the administration, had a duty to review the deal, but says he first learned of it “by reading it in the newspapers.”

The White House is accusing its critics of bigotry. Dubai has been an ally in the current fight against terrorist groups. Press Secretary Scott McClellan says “We shouldn’t be holding a Middle Eastern company to a different standard” than companies from other parts of the world.

It that true?

Just a few weeks ago, twenty-three al Qaeda prisoners escaped from a prison in Yemen. Yemen, like Dubai, is an ally in the anti-terrorist fight. It is believed the escapees had inside help. Do you suppose they would have found enough sympathetic insiders to escape from a prison in some other part of the world?

Am I suggesting that Middle Eastern people are inherently untrustworthy? Not at all.

Listen: during the 1960s, in some parts of the United States, the men who bombed a Birmingham, Alabama church and killed four little girls were treated like heroes. In the 1990s, some Americans wanted to help fugitive Eric Rudolph, who killed and injured people in a series of bombings, including one at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

If people like that were considered heroes by some Americans, would it be surprising to learn that some otherwise upstanding citizens of Dubai, from all walks of life, secretly feel sympathy for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda? It would be disappointing if a quiet al Qaeda sympathizer with inside knowledge of U.S. port operations used that knowledge to help jihadists smuggle people or material into the United States, but would it be surprising?

Well, terrorism has been good for George W. Bush. I suppose another attack would help his approval ratings, which have been down in the dumps.

Sarah Vowell on The Daily Show:

The thing about the current president is — I wrote about this a little bit — how he keeps opening up new possibilities for us. You know, like I talk about going to his inauguration and standing there and crying when he took the oath, ’cause I was so afraid that he would wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water. The failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.

If you want to smother a democracy, you’re going to want to work in the dark:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

…

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war.…

…

[A research group at George Washington University] plans to post Mr. Aid’s reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

…

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

…

“I think this is a travesty,” said Dr. [Anna K.] Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. “I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts.”

Of course, the Bush Administration believes facts are implicated with reality in a conspiracy to undermine the Administration’s authority. From a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Remember, folks: Bush, Cheney and Company aren’t liars, because truth is an illusion.

If you are a real defender of free speech, sometimes you will feel the little hairs standing up on the back of your neck. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect anyone if it doesn’t protect the people you’d most like to shut up. It doesn’t protect any ideas unless it protects the ideas you most wish to stifle.

If this guy doesn’t have freedom of speech, then no one does.

Seventy years ago, the world watched a modern, civilized nation slowly spiraling into madness.

When people were arrested without charges and held without a trial and without a chance to defend themselves, the world said, “These are trying times, and no one should be surprised at some excesses.” When laws were passed stripping certain citizens of most of their rights, the world said, “These things happen. At least it’s not everyone.” When the government turned a blind eye to riot and murder, the world said, “The German people have a proud heritage. Soon they will stand up to set things right.”

How did that all work out?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We’re in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

…

Mr. Arar’s case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria’s torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He’s never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that “accidents will happen” in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar’s behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn’t matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar’s lawsuit last Thursday.…

[Judge Trager] said that “the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted.”

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

…

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what’s not O.K.?

History repeats itself. This modern, civilized nation is slowly spiraling into madness. It’s time, right now, for the American people to stand up and set things right.

A few years ago I was being shown around some of the ritzier neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I saw a fancy sports car just ahead of us, with a vanity license plate that said, “MENSCH.”

“I know one thing about the guy in that car,” I said. “He’s no mensch.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the mensch gap:

“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren’t mensches.

Dick Cheney isn’t a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney’s recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion’s aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about “unknown unknowns” and going to war with “the army you have…”

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn’t a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans?…

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn’t a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan’s catastrophic start doesn’t reflect poorly on his department, that “no logical person” would have expected “a transition happening that is so large without some problems.” In fact, Medicare’s 1966 startup went very smoothly.…

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

…

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders’ character, it has horrifying consequences. You can’t learn from mistakes if you won’t admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

During the campaign of 2004, I heard people complain that John Kerry was too smart; that he knew foreign languages; that he had traveled to many countries. One person said, “He thinks he’s better than us.”

Bush doesn’t?

Kerry showed he had the intellect for the job, and some Americans saw a threat to the idea that “all men are created equal,” I guess.

Personally, I want somebody way smarter than me as president, but many American voters seem uncomfortable with a president who’s too smart, so we get the fake down-home Texas boy, George W. Bush, and his team of Washington Blame-Dodgers.

Oy vey.

Poor Mr. Cheney is such a delicate flower:

Harry Whittington said Friday he was sorry for what Dick Cheney and his family have “had to go through” after the vice president shot him in a weekend hunting accident.

In other news, Republicans are demanding that Roman Polanski apologize to Charles Manson for the trauma Manson must have suffered after ordering the killings of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and four others at Polanski’s home. “Manson has suffered for years over this. Polanski publicly displayed almost crippling grief over the deaths of his wife and friends, but he has never shown one bit of remorse for Charlie’s suffering,” a GOP spokesman said, wiping a tear from his eye. “I — I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”

“We all assume certain risks in whatever we do,” Whittington said. “Whatever activities we pursue and regardless of how experienced, careful and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen.”

When we're not careful, they happen more often. And the really big accidents seem to cluster around Cheney, Bush and Company. They’re just unlucky, I guess.

Bumper stickers may be our culture’s greatest repository of wisdom. I just got back from a long walk, where I saw this:

Your Silence Won’t Save You

A thought worth remembering.

No more Danish pastries in Iran:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed.”

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners’ union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

Isn’t that silly? The Iranians are throwing any concept of common sense out the window, and letting the overheated emotions of the moment lead them to make fools of themselves. What’s with those people, anyway? Where do they get these ridiculous ideas?

They’re all governed by emotion over there, you know. Not like us Americans. We’re rational. Our actions are guided by facts and logic. You know, if Denmark did something to offend us, we’d deal with our differences like grown-ups, and go right on eating those delicious Danish pastries. If the Belgians offended us, we’d arrange a breakfast meeting and work things out quickly and sensibly, perhaps over some Belgian waffles. If the French offended us, uh…

You know, uh… maybe this is a positive sign. Yeah. The Iranians are following the American example. That’s right — democracy is taking root! Yeah!

Sigh…

Dick Cheney’s gunshot victim has taken a turn for the worse:

The man shot by Vice President Dick Cheney suffered a minor heart attack after birdshot moved into his heart, hospital officials said today, and was moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment.

Texas attorney Harry Whittington was recovering and will be monitored for seven days to make sure more bird shot doesn’t move to other organs or move to other part of his body, hospital officials said.

Unless Whittington recovers fully, we’re going to feel very bad about all the jokes that have been made about his shooting.

If, like me, you are a bitter pathetic loser who dreads Valentine’s Day, then this cartoon from Joy of Tech is for you.

If you’re not a bitter pathetic loser, then, umm… Happy Valentine’s Day, I guess.

Via Crooks and Liars: Editor & Publisher reports on a V.A. nurse investigated for “sedition” for criticizing the Bush Administration:

Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. …

The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to the press, but reportedly fears losing her job.

…

V.A. human resources chief Mel Hooker had said in a Nov. 9 letter that his agency was obligated to investigate “any act which potentially represents sedition,” the ACLU said.

Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico, told The Progressive magazine: “We were shocked to see the word ‘sedition’ used. Sedition? That’s like something out of the history books.”

In a press release, Simonson also said: “Is this government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of ‘sedition’?”

Accidents happen. I know this from personal experience. But only a few people try to get away with a hit and run. From Editor & Publisher:

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occured and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but there was no indication whether the Vice President’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

…

While E&P was first to raise the question about the delay Sunday afternoon, Frank James, reporter in the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau, put his own spin on it later in the day, asking, “How is it that Vice President Cheney can shoot a man, albeit accidentally, on Saturday during a hunting trip and the American public not be informed of it until today?”

Indeed, others raised questions as well. “There was no immediate reason given as to why the incident wasn’t reported until Sunday,” The Dallas Morning News observed. “The sheriff’s office in Kenedy County did not respond to phone calls Sunday.”

…

The [Houston] Chronicle also reports Monday that hunting accidents are amazingly rare in Texas. In 2004, it said, the state’s 1 million-plus hunters were involved in only 29 hunting-related accidents (19 involving firearms), four of which were fatal.

Let’s think about this for a second. If one percent of the hunters in Texas were as careless as Dick Cheney, there would have been 10,000 hunting accidents in 2004. If a tenth of one percent were as careless as Cheney, there would have been 1,000 accidents. If one one-hundredth of one percent of Texas hunters were as careless as Dick Cheney, there would have been 100 accidents.

Dick Cheney is in a rarefied group. In 2004, only 0.0019% of hunters in Texas were as careless with a gun as he was on Saturday.

I’ve long thought that we should select exceptional men and women for high office in this country. I just thought it would work out a little differently.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. He was born on February 12, 1809.

Years ago, my favorite president was Thomas Jefferson, but I think that preference was based almost entirely on his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and very little on his presidency. Besides, almost everyone was in the Lincoln camp, and I didn’t wish to hop on a crowded bandwagon.

But the more I learned about Lincoln, the higher my opinion of him grew. Abraham Lincoln was not just the greatest president; he was the greatest American. But he was more, even, than that.

An eyewitness account of Lincoln’s February 27, 1860 speech at Cooper Union, from the New York Tribune:

He was tall, tall — oh, how tall, and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill-fitting, badly wrinkled — as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean stock, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture I noticed that they were very large.

He began in a very low tone of voice as if he were used to speaking out of doors and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, ‘Mr. Cheerman” instead of ‘Mr. Chairman,’ and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself: “Old fellow, you won’t do. It is all very well for the wild west, but this will never go down in New York.”

But pretty soon, he began to get into his subject: he straightened up and made regular and graceful gestures. His face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close parts of his arguments, you could hear the gentle sizzing of the gas burners. When he reached a climax, the thunders of applause were terrific.

It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall, my face glowing with excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul!’ And I think so yet.

“The greatest man since St. Paul.” That seems about right.

I think this summer, I’ll make a pilgrimage to Springfield, Illinois, to walk in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, a secular saint and the greatest of great men.

This is not a joke:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was “alert and doing fine” after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Cartoonist Ward Sutton charts the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Neither side comes out looking very good.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looks at George W. Bush’s memoir of addiction, A Million Little Barrels, including a publisher’s disclaimer that says Saddam’s “possession of WMDs was an ‘emotional truth,’ not the ‘actual truth.’”

On CBS News tonight, Steve Kroft previewed a 60 Minutes story from this Sunday’s show. The subject is the $8.8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds that has simply disappeared.

Kroft quoted a memo in which a government official wrote about a particular contractor who received $100 million in reconstruction contracts. The memo said the company:

has shown themselves to be (1) unresponsive; (2) uncooperative; (3) incompetent; (4) deceitful/manipulative; and (5) “war profiteers.” Other than that, they are “swell fellows.”

It’s not really surprising that the Administration is doing business with companies like this — they recognize a kindred spirit. The description of the contractor in the memo seems to fit the Bush Administration itself just like a glove.

I’m tuning in to 60 Minutes this Sunday. Looks worth watching.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow notes that while the innocent have nothing to hide, the Bush Administration has plenty to hide.

Tom DeLay says the Constitution provides no right of privacy to the American people, and for years Republicans have been filling federal judgeships with people who share that view. Privacy, it seems, is the Divine Right of King George alone.

After every big sports event, it seems, reporters make their way into the winning team’s locker room, where we hear player after player give all credit for the victory to Jesus.

I hope that someday an enterprising cub reporter will go to the losing team’s locker room, so we can hear the players complain that Satan has let them down.

Given Jesus’ sports record in recent decades, I’m surprised that any athlete trusts Satan these days. The Jesus team always wins the big games, and yet there is always a losing team, too. Don’t those players know that the Devil’s a liar?

Actually, maybe that’s how Satan lures them in.

Have you ever thought about finding out which team Satan’s backing in a big game, and laying down a lot of money on the other team? It seems like a sure bet, doesn’t it? But I resist that temptation when I consider that perhaps Satan’s been throwing all these games just to run up the odds, and that someday he’ll win a game and cash in big time. Perhaps that’s the story he tells his hapless players.

Never trust Satan, folks. He cheats.

I’m not much of a football fan, and I quickly tire of relentless hype, so I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday. I see today that the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks 21-10, ABC bleeped the Rolling Stones twice during the halftime show, and people are talking about the ten thousand or so commercials that aired during the game.

Well, maybe it wasn’t ten thousand commercials, but it sure was a lot. Superbowl commercials generate so much buzz that this site was created with links to all the commercials. (I had some trouble getting the page to load, but I’m on a Macintosh, running an unconventional brower, OmniWeb. Hope it works first time for you.)

I haven’t seen all the commercials yet. I don’t think I’m ever going to watch all of them — I’m a middle-aged man, and life is short. I did see this one. It isn’t what I expected from a Superbowl commercial. To that, I say “Bravo!”

(I confess: I’m just an old softy at heart.)

MoveOn.org has a new TV ad asking whether you can tell Bush and Nixon apart. (A larger version of the video is available at Crooks and Liars.)

I was just watching an episode of the PBS program American Experience, about the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal after World War II. During his cross examination of Hermann Goering, Robert H. Jackson, the chief counsel for the United States and a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asked the following question:

You did prohibit all court review, and considered it necessary to prohibit court review of the causes for taking people into what you call protective custody. That is right, isn’t it?

Goering answered, in a roundabout way, that Jackson was correct.

You know, this situation reminds me of something more recent. Gitmo, perhaps? Or was it Tom Delay, bemoaning the existence of judicial review in the Washington Times?

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

Or perhaps it reminds me of the Bush Administration’s determination to skip constitutionally-mandated warrants for their domestic wiretaps. There are just so many things to choose from, when looking for examples of official unwillingness to be constrained by law.

This little exchange from the Nuremberg transcript sends a shiver down my spine, for some reason:

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Was it also necessary, in operating this system, that you must not have persons entitled to public trials in independent courts? And you immediately issued an order that your political police would not be subject to court review or to court orders, did you not?

GOERING: You must differentiate between the two categories; those who had committed some act of treason against the new state or those who might be proved to have committed such an act, were naturally turned over to the courts. The others, however, of whom one might expect such acts, but who had not yet committed them, were taken into protective custody, and these were the people who were taken to concentration camps.

Brrrrrrrrrrr!!!

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the grim state of the union:

So President Bush’s plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.

…

Here’s the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that “cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol” and other technologies would allow us “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East.”

But the next day, officials explained that he didn’t really mean what he said. “This was purely an example,” said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. …

…

What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration’s achievements. But what’s a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush’s largest domestic initiative to date. It’s also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we’ve “changed our approach to reconstruction.”

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

…

There’s a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. … I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.”

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That’s why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It’s why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it’s why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

A CNN transcript of their coverage, three years ago today, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry:

MILES O’BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Got a little problem on the space shuttle Columbia. It’s been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes. Let’s take a look at a live picture of Mission Control in Houston. As we’ve been telling you all this morning, it is on its way in for a landing, and flight controllers there in Houston are busy going through their no-com procedures, in other words, lack of communication from the shuttle. They’ve been trying to raise the space shuttle Columbia for quite some time now.

…

And at this juncture, we — I cannot tell you honestly the significance of it, except to tell you that the space shuttle Columbia was due for a landing right about now. We are watching this very closely.

More of the transcript, plus other related transcripts, can be found here.
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In T.H. White’s great novel, The Once and Future King, King Arthur is a radical thinker who works to replace the rule of brute force with the rule of law. It’s not easy, and he takes some missteps along the way.

In this scene, Arthur is talking with his queen, Guenever, and his greatest knight, Lancelot. The King is worried about certain factions in his court, and Lancelot suggests that he could simply kill one critic who particularly worries him.

The King suddenly looked surprised, or shocked. He had been sitting relaxed between them, because he was tired and unhappy, yet now he drew himself up and met his captain in the eye.

“You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish.”

He forgave the startled expression in Lancelot’s face, and took his hand once more.

“You will find,” he explained, “that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies, too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people. And naturally I want my people to have the new law, because then they are more prosperous, and I am more prosperous in consequence.”

These days, presidents wish to be kings in order to be free of all law.

All kings, it seems, are not created equal.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd:

The White House should hire an anthropologist.

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn’t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

…

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that “mirroring” — assuming other cultures think like us — doesn’t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama’s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

Bush officials keep claiming they couldn’t have anticipated disasters — from the terrorist attacks to Katrina — even when they got specific warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake nuclear threat in Iraq, they misplayed the real ones in Iran and North Korea. In London Sunday, Condi Rice admitted that all of our diplomats and spies were caught off guard by the Hamas win. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” she said. “It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.”

…

The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five oblivious years, about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton and Exxon are swimming in profits — Exxon’s revenues were bigger than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia or Indonesia — was rich.

A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq “a black hole.” The “spiraling security disaster,” she told Larry King, had robbed Iraqis of hope, “and by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse.”

But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East country — and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another — without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?