Former President George W. Bush has withdrawn from current political debates to work on the historical legacy of his own administration -- but Karl Rove and other old hands are soldiering on. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

We were Josh-less this week, but our small staff managed to crank out some pretty cool stuff in his absence.

Yglesias:

[W]hatever one [thinks] should be done with large financial institutions as a policy matter, surely we [can] agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people. ... These are people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. ... They're multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more. ...

[I]t's a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we've lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who's ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it's very unlikely that the "best" young people were going into finance. And to say that they're not necessarily good people need not entail that they're criminals. Simply the fact that the best people are people who aren't primarily driven by greed.

From the NYT:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

The commercial fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide industry is not so happy about Michelle Obama's organic White House garden -- and took the trouble to write her a letter about it:

"Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical," the Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) wrote the first lady last month a few days after she and fifth-graders from a local elementary school planted the White House Kitchen Garden.

"CropLife" and "MACA" -- neither of those things sound wholesome or flavorful. But since they mentioned it, I think I'll make a special trip to the farmers' market tomorrow morning.

Late Update: TPM Reader BW does me one better:

How weird is it that "conventional" farming is the sort that involves synthetic chemicals, massive amounts of water and petroleum, and technology only available in the last 100 years.

A lawyer representing detainees at Gitmo tells TPMmuckraker that the foot-dragging and stonewalling that marked the Bush Administration's handling of detainee cases continues unabated under President Obama:

It did not surprise me in the slightest that the Bush administration would do everything in its power to subvert the Supreme Court's ruling. I expected that. What I did not expect is that there would be absolutely zero change in the stonewall strategy when the [new] administration came in.

Zack Roth has more.

Not everyone in the media fell for the GOP's "up is down-ism" this week on the new Obama Pentagon budget:

But even as we were putting together the above montage, along came this from the always reliable Fox News:

NOM's anti-gay marriage campaign: 2M4M.

Sigh.

... then why are anti-stimulus Republicans suddenly clamoring about the stimulative effect of military spending?

Let's re-start the party.

Eric Kleefeld has the latest from the NY-20.

It's not Rome v. Avignon, but Pat Buchanan and Lawrence O'Donnell had an epic row last night on Hardball over the bizarre (and apparently very limited) opposition to Notre Dame University inviting President Obama to speak:

Obama wants a fast-tracked $83.4 billion from Congress for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

We've been hitting repeatedly this week on the flawed meta-narrative that Republicans immediately deployed -- and that some in the media lapped right up -- to counter Bob Gates' new budget proposal for the Pentagon. But there's a lot going on here beyond the canard that Obama is "gutting" defense spending when in fact he's proposing an overall increase in the Pentagon's budget (a fact, by the way, that makes it easier to debunk the meme, but which really shouldn't be dispositive either way -- would a four percent decrease in spending be "gutting" the military?).

As I've said, this is just the most recent iteration of a 20-year debate over what the military should look like after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or to use a more apt analogy, the latest battle in a long war. Proponents of new, coherent defense spending priorities have won a few skirmishes here and there, but by and large, the entrenched defense contractor interests have prevailed in every major battle.

It's been a messy war, in which it has not always been easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, as flawed as he was, was a leading advocate of "transforming" the military. (In fact, some have argued that Rumsfeld would not have lasted much longer as secretary of defense, so poorly were his efforts at transformation being received in the Pentagon, had the 9/11 attacks not intervened.) The fighting has rarely broken down cleanly along party lines, either, except in the broadest sense. Democrats with defense industries in their districts have historically been among the most tenacious opponents of reform, even as Republicans lob charges that Democrats are soft on defense.

All of which is to say that there is a lot of history here and a lot of nuance, most of which will be lost in the debate that's already started. There's also no one right way to restructure the military, and serious disagreements exist even among those who agree that major restructuring is necessary. (And, in fact, there's substantial disagreement over whether the Gates plan equals real reform.) We'll be trying to sort the noise from the substance as this debate proceeds.

So here's some substance. Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), a former rear admiral, was on MSNBC this morning, and he gave a broad summary of the Gates proposal, which he supports. If you haven't been following events this week closely, this is a good primer:

Brian Beutler has more on Sestak, and the important role he may play in this debate, at TPMDC.

The CIA says it is shutting down its system of secret prisons where torture was carried out, but Director Leon Panetta said that CIA officers who participated in Bush-era abuses "should not be investigated, let alone punished."

I guess that means Mark Swanner is off the hook.