“I’m saying that nobody knows what humiliating treatment is. What does it mean?”
–National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
If you were to pick the single greatest hypocrisy of the Bush Presidency, wouldn’t it have to be this: that the man who ostentatiously claims Jesus as his favorite philosopher (he of “do unto others as ye would have them do unto you” fame) would say, in all seriousness, “Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. “What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?”
That’s my entry. Yours?
Straight from late night TV commercials — (Board of) Directors Gone Wild!
From the NYT …
A secret investigation of news leaks at Hewlett-Packard was more elaborate than previously reported, and almost from the start involved the illicit gathering of private phone records and direct surveillance of board members and journalists, according to people briefed on the companyâs review of the operation.
…
Those briefed on the companyâs review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalistâs computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.
Planting snooping software on journalists’ computers. Lovely.
Who wants to bet someone does time?
Bob Ney/Bob Ney/How many GOP hopes/Did you dash today? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Whoa. New Rasmussen polls show that in three key Senate races (Ohio, Montana, Rhode Island), Republicans are trailng by significant margins.
It’s hard to know who to root for or who to expect will come out on top in the long-running and fast-galloping race between John Yoo’s moral bankruptcy and his historical illiteracy, but as long as the topic has foisted itself upon us again, I would like to address this question of War on Terror-inspired Cold War revisionism.
As you’ve probably seen, Yoo has now taken to arguing that the restraints on presidential power enshrined in the 1970s came about largely because the US faced no serious national security threats during that era. (George McGovern must be kicking himself, right?) And it occurs to me, considering this, that even at the relatively young age of 37, I and those my age are probably the last people who have any meaningful living memory of what the Cold War was like. Or in other words, what it was like living in a world where the primary geopolitical antagonism was between the United States and the Soviet Union and a full escalation of that conflict would result, for all practical purposes, in the end of the world.
So, perhaps folks in their twenties and early thirties have some excuse for this dingbat historical amnesia, but what’s the excuse of anyone over 40?
Terrorism is scary. More so if you live in a major city like New York. But life’s hard. And compared to nuclear holocaust it’s really pretty much a walk in the park, isn’t it?
Rep. John Sweeney’s (R-NY) a genuine article Bush lap dog. But this is a pretty good ad. It also shows you something about the direction of this campaign.
There’s been a lot of discussion, and rightly so, about Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s excellent piece in yesterday’s Post about how GOP bonafides trumped virtually everything else in the staffing of the American occupation and rebuilding of Iraq.
Along those lines, I can’t help but flag this piece my colleagues and I at the Washington Monthly did back in December 2003 on this topic.
State of Indiana sues Swift Boat 2.0 group over harassing phone calls.
Halliburton promises wounded employees in Iraq help getting medals and other honors for their service … if they agree not to sue Halliburton.