Sullivan makes more good points on the implications of the torture memos

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics".
Something is rotten in a country where this can happen with such impunity - and when, even now, highly regarded and respected journalists and commentators simply move on or roll their eyes or sigh world-weary sighs.
What we just lived through was an attack on the Constitution of the United States, conducted by the president and vice-president and an array of apparatchiks.The theory undergirding it renders the entire constitution subject to one man's prerogative. The conservative blogosphere - who resolutely ignored this in deference to their Caesar - now bleats about Obama's alleged threat to the constitution!

Whole thing here: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/criminals-in-th.html

The real amount of warning

Despite what you might believe from watching movies such as Deep Impact or Armageddon, we're not likely to have months or a year to prepare to take a catastrophic meteor impact.

As this story relates: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.783c3aae6eb418393fc6f8c443ef6765.2f1&show_article=1
a sizable rock just flew by us this weekend.

If it had hit it would have been as big a blast as the famous 1908 event that flattened a Siberian forest. Now, the Earth is a big place and it's more likely than not that something like that would end up exploding over the ocean, a pole, the Sahara or Himalayas or Siberia again and not over India, coastal China, Paris or New York --but do we feel that lucky?

The story said that the rock flew by Monday and had been detected only Saturday! This suggests that, given the time needed to calculate trajectories and get the word out, average people would have had, at best, a little more than a day to get ready.

Larison on the hypocrites who spent years calling dissent unpatriotic

Opponents of the war did not wish for Bush to fail in matters related to national security, but rather wished for him not to make colossal blunders that would undermine national security, weaken and strain our military and needlessly compromise constitutional protections and the nation’s reputation. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that Bush’s critics on the war wished that he not embark on a course of action that was bound to fail on the administration’s own terms. When Mr. Bush ended his second term as a failed President, it was his supporters who continued to back him in every bad decision he made who had ensured that he failed. In other words, in resisting the policies the President wanted and implemented his critics were actually serving the President’s best interests, and he would have been wise to heed their warnings. Perhaps then he would not have left office as one of the most-loathed and discredited Presidents in history. Obviously, Limbaugh has never argued anything remotely like this, and even if he does mean something other than what he said his statement will not be received that way.

The Rushpublican Party

When the head of the RNC feels it necessary to apologize to a talk-radio host you know that there's no self-respect left.

Folks, it's officially the Rushpublican Party now.

Comprehensive smackdown

DOJ link to discredited Yoo memos: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/olc-memos.htm

Good luck with that

Frum:

But what about the rest of the party? Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:
On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.
And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

Update: Steele grovels to Rush: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19517.html

He didn't know watermelons were a stereotype

One of the most annoying things about the faux apologies that go around these days is that the apologizer implicit assumes the rest of us a credulous fools who are as stupid as they are.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/25/white-house-watermelon-em_n_169933.html

The latest is Los Alomitos, Calif., Mayor Dean Grose. He said he was unaware of the racial stereotype that black people like watermelons.

Right.

Evidently he assumes that we're stupid enough to believe that it's just a coincidence he chose watermelons to be on the White House lawn in his email "joke."

Here's a photo of the mayor from his Web site. I don;t know how old he is, but he's obviously not a young kid and it's simply unbelievable that a grown man his age didn't know about the stereotype.

In the Army we used to call this sort of behavior pissing-on-me-and-telling-me-it-is-raining.

It's bad enough he did it, but please don't insult our intelligence by pretending it was some innocent mistake.