p m carpenter's commentary

Accountability cuts both ways, Senator: Of empty outrage and forsaken impeachment

You've got to hand it to this administration. It doesn't spring surprises. It is, instead, consistently corrupt, or incompetent, or both. It never fails to live up to our every expectation.

And on occasion it even folds a little ingenuity into its corrupt incompetence, such as opening whole new creative vistas in criminal jurisprudence. For instance rather than offering immunity to just one or two potential defendants among a herd of contemptible wrongdoers, why not immunize -- and while they're at it, with no legal authority to do so -- virtually the whole bloody lot of them? That oughta crack the case, for sure.

The reporting on this Keystone Cop affair has been cornered -- almost amusingly -- into the realms of high understatement and cognitive dissonance. The State Department's incompetence -- or deliberate criminal malfeasance: "Don't worry, boys, we know how to screw this investigation up beyond all legal repair" -- was so stupendously imbecilic, it left journalists with the untidy task of trying to nonjudgmentally frame the department's idiocy, while also having to judgmentally offer a peek into the idiocy's certain denouement.

Before delicately noting that "usually, people suspected of crimes are not given immunity," the New York Times characterized the nevertheless-proffered immunity as "a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees."

You think? Well, you think right. Because elsewhere the paper noted that "the courts have made it all but impossible to prosecute defendants who have been granted immunity since the appellate court reversals of the Iran-contra affair convictions against John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser, and Oliver L. North, a national security aide, who had each been immunized by Congress."

The intentional mess has also left Congressional Democrats flummoxed, though for the life of me I can't understand why (see this column's opening lines). But rather than joining journalists in high understatement, their reaction has been to stage only the customary high theatre in the typical two acts: outrage, followed by no follow-through, willful impotence and indecent resignation.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, for instance, "issued an angry statement." Oh my. Said the Judiciary chairman, "In this administration, accountability goes by the boards. If you get caught, they will give you immunity. If you get convicted, they will commute your sentence."

He neglected to add: Then they'll give you the Medal of Freedom. Or is it the Iron Cross, First Class. I forget.

What the good senator also neglected to take into public consideration, however, is that when it's the criminals themselves in charge of accountability dispensation, one can't really expect said accountability to go anywhere but "by the boards."

As I recall, that's why the Framers charged Congress with a little something called oversight -- checks and balances, co-equal powers, all manner of elaborate pushbacks; and if things get too far out of control, removal from executive office.

These weren't mere and gentle suggestions, Senator Leahy. They were constitutional imperatives: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office" when they're found to be a lawless bunch of thugs, to mix the verbatim with the vernacular.

Hence accountability cuts both ways, Senator. So as you and your colleagues (with the notable exception of integrity-laden Dennis Kucinich) fail to live up to your end of the constitutional bargain, you might want to put a lid on the empty outrage. It's insulting to those with respect for the constitutional imperatives going by the board, and right "off the table."

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Hopefully crazy: the right's unAmerican yearning for a John Wayne government

Yesterday was a good day for crazy.

Last week I asked if it wasn't time for Congress to ask -- and not entirely rhetorically -- Is the president mad? But yesterday, the somewhat more widely read New York Times took a double-barreled survey of the psychiatrically troubled recesses of the conservative mind, and crazy, hands down, was king.

First, in asking if Mad Ludwig will "manage to leave office without starting [another] war," the Times' editorial board felt justifiably compelled to pepper its musings with the following, uneasy terms: "a ghoulish guessing game," the whimsical futility of "bank[ing] on sanity," a reference to "fantasy," and -- of keenest and simplest diagnostic value -- "the crazy American government."

Hey, Messrs. Editorialists of Record, don't sugarcoat it. Give it to us straight.

Meanwhile, adjacent to the Times' diagnosis of the contemporary conservative mind was columnist Paul Krugman's, which, as well, included an examination of the "crazy talk" coming from the Republican Party's leading presidential candidates -- some only slightly "saner" than others.

But Krugman's musings on the psychiatrically dark and abnormal were also historical in nature -- using, as he did, the recent past as an explanatory platform for the dubious present.

"In the wake of 9/11," he noted, "the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy." That screwing-with-our-minds strategy was, as we know, a boffo success.

But despite the continuity of fear-mongering with which the administration labored, "most Americans," Krugman further noted, "have now regained their balance." And that, of course, is well and good and likely true.

On the other hand, Krugman posited that "the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up.... And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear."

Being happy to oblige, "many of the men who hope to be the next president -- including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination -- have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns." Thus, concluded Krugman, an "unreasoning fear" -- shorthand note: "crazy" -- "has taken over one of America’s two great political parties."

And that's where I must part company with Paul. Not in the fundamental diagnosis of crazy, but in its underlying cause.

With absolutely no psychiatric training whatsoever -- but with, at least, some considerable schooling in the authoritarian mind -- I would posit that the Republican base isn't wallowing in party-induced fear at all. They harbor no real, gripping panic over impending terrorist attacks, or dark-skinned bogeymen, or any of the other commonly spread hysterias used to degrade our governmental system of laws.

They know, instead, that it's a hoax -- a political tool -- employed merely in the realization of that singular dream that lies closest to their little authoritarian hearts: the Strong Man as Leader; the suppression of constitutional impediments; the virtual obliteration of checks and balances on He Who Rightly Rules, and properly alone.

The dedicated right finds comfort in such simplicity. It's clean, it's linear, it contains no frustrating obstacles to decisive action; it is infinitely reassuring. The right seeks a John Wayne government, oblivious to its ultimate George Armstrong Custer realities.

It's crazy, all right. But the condition isn't grounded in fear. It's grounded in hope.

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How can Democrats miss their shot at a more honorable America? Pretty easily

It's long, coming in at 8,000 words. But it's essential reading -- a portal into a political future of unknown potential, as well as the basis of a new guessing game about how Democrats can screw this up.

The "it" is David Kirkpatrick's New York Times Magazine piece, "The Evangelical Crackup." Kirkpatrick, who covered the incestuous affair between conservative Christianity and Bushian politics for the Times during the 2004 election, got to "wonder[ing] how the world was looking from the pulpits and pews" these days. So he traveled to Ground Zero -- Wichita, Kansas, "as close as any place to the heart of conservative Christian America" -- to take a little look-see. What he found were even more internal divisions and troubles than have been reported of late.

There's so much to savor in Kirkpatrick's reporting, I'm tempted to quote extensively and just leave it at that. But I'll offer merely the gist of it, along with a concluding remark. And without fear of overstating the piece, the gist is this: The politically aligned Christian movement, as a unified, singular power, is not only in bitter shambles; it is toast -- effectively over as anything resembling a Republican base in 2008.

Drawing from three separate paragraphs, here's a sewn-together sentence that may do some violence to elegant syntax, but not, I think, to Kirkpatrick's general findings in his own words: "Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land..., [yet] today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders ... [and] ... a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party -- some as likely to lean left as right -- is beginning to speak up."

What developments made the difference? The war, for one -- perhaps the one, for now. "Every time I visited an evangelical church in 2004," writes Kirkpatrick, "it seemed that a member’s brother or cousin had just returned from Iraq with reports that much greater progress was being made than the news media let on." But not now. Admittedly what Kirkpatrick offers is anecdotal, but it's powerfully anecdotal and hard to diminish in its importance. Now, there's little more than disdain for both the war effort and its principal driver.

"'We know we want to get rid of Bush,'" Linda J. Hogle, a product demonstrator at Sam’s Club, told me when I asked her about the 2008 election at her evangelical church’s Fourth of July picnic. 'I am glad he can’t run again,' agreed her friend, Floyd Willson. Hogle and Willson both voted for President Bush in 2004. Both are furious at the war and are looking to vote for a Democrat next year. 'Upwards of a thousand boys that have been needlessly killed, it is all just politics,' Willson said."

But there's something else in play. And for the long term, that something holds far more political kick -- against the right, and, if only by default, in the left's favor. As Kirkpatrick puts it, there's "a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty."

This philosophical "rift" is real and widening between the old bulls, such as James Dobson, and the movement's younger movers and shakers, such as those who've actually read and comprehended the Bible's message. As generational as it may be, however, there is evidence the rift has been subject to considerable seepage:

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 -- the future of the church -- were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

OK, I'm guilty of quoting a trifle more extensively than I planned. But the above is key -- the key, perhaps -- to a more vigorous, muscular and vastly expanded left in America.

So, how can the left's principal voice -- however inadequate, that would be the Democratic Party -- screw this up? How can it miss its shot at a natural co-optation that would smooth the electoral path to a more honorable America?

Easy. It can keep right on doing what it's doing. It can continue trying to please the older bulls and their stubbornly conservative but diminishing Christian legions by continuing to cozy up to Bush & Co.'s bellicose ways. And it can stay hooked up to the corporate I.V. of social-justice-suppressing and vote-controlling cash.

In short, the party can, by simply remaining itself -- itself as we now know it -- utterly and easily dismiss this rarest of opportunities: to actually grow in power and numbers by actually doing the right and honorable things.

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Rudy lies -- and the press takes it lying down

Rudy Giuliani lies. He doesn't merely stretch the truth, as any ambitious pol is wont to do. He just makes stuff up. And when done with abandon, making stuff up is called lying. There is simply no better, no more accurate way to put it -- and in this presidential election cycle, with all that's at stake, we had better start calling a spade a spade, lest we get stuck with another liar of unchecked width and depth.

Unfortunately, however, you can't count on major press outlets to clue you in on Rudy's lying -- or what they could, at the very least, prominently note as factual missteps. They're too busy covering the horse-race angles. Substance, I guess, is perceived as boring.

The advanced condition of both Rudy's pathology and journalism's indifference to it was brought home to me early this morning upon reading this entry in the Washington Post: "Giuliani's Bid to Woo New Hampshire Independents Centers on Health Care," written by no less than two Post reporters, the camera-hugging Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray.

The piece opens with the savvy journalists noting the critical importance of New Hampshire's independent voting bloc. Rudy is also aware of this electoral reality, so, continue the journalists, the former mayor "is set to begin a direct-mail and radio campaign ... aimed at persuading unaligned voters to back his candidacy."

Naturally he needed an angle, and -- we can at least thank God for this -- Rudy landed on something other than 9/11. The media blitz, write Chris and Shailagh, is "centered on Giuliani's health-care plan," the details of which the piece says absolutely nothing, other than that they are among the most liberty-loving of health-care plans, and that "even [his] spokeswoman ... is on message," an observation of somewhat less than breathtaking insight.

There was, however, one detail mentioned, although it had nothing to do with Rudy's proposal. To wit,

"In the radio spot, Giuliani mentions his battle with prostate cancer and notes that his chances of surviving the disease in America were 82 percent, while in England his chances would have been 44 percent."

This just as naturally caught and then raised my eye. It seemed an astounding "fact," one either uplifting or thoroughly depressing, depending on one's gender and country of residence. It also seemed quite literally unbelievable. Yet there it sat, in print, with no journalistic probing of it.

So, deploying my vast research skills, I Googled "England prostate cancer survival rate," and up popped the Web site of "Cancer Research UK," the "leading funder of cancer research" in the Queen's realm. Want to know what I found?

I shall quote: "The relative five-year survival rate for men diagnosed in England in 2000–01 was 71%," which indicates that Rudy's flat figure of 44 was creatively arrived at, statistically speaking. Not only that, for mates in Rudy's current age group, 60-69, the survival rate is 83 percent -- one uptick higher than his vaunted statistic for us ruggedly male, American individualists. Yet those socialist bastards are doing it on the government plan.

Rudy, simply put, is lying -- but instead of taking a few seconds to research and then convey that salient fact, Chris and Shailagh treated us to news of Rudy's intrepid efforts at capturing the independent bloc.

You know what else? Perhaps you should make an offering of journalistic subsidy to the Post, and not me. For -- best case scenario -- it seems the poor dears can't afford the Internets as a basic research tool.

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Something's Gotta Give: Portraits in Criminal Failure

There it is this morning -- the most representative snapshot yet of what the Bush administration has wrought: three adjacent stories of horror and despair cascading down the Washington Post's front page.

Before proceeding, it is first worth noting that the journalistic tension at the Post now seems to have reached the farcical level of the Wall Street Journal's: its reporters report -- see above; "stories of horror" -- then its elite editorial corps settles back and repackages the horrible contemporaneities into the blandly tolerable.

And this morning we have step one of the two-pronged process: three headlines, reading top to bottom, "CIA's 'Ghost Prisoners' Fade into Obscurity," "U.S. to Order Diplomats to Iraq," and "Not 'Worth Another Soldier's Life.'"

If you ever wanted a handy spot-check of the status quo's central front, there you have it: Those who are there want the hell out; those who aren't there want to stay the hell out; and some of those who lived on the edges have simply vanished, Pinochet-style.

As for the latter, since a bit more than a year ago, when our memo-comforted commander in chief nevertheless declared an end to his archipelago of secret prisons (I still can't believe any American would have to write such a line) and he transferred some of the torture victims (there's goes that incredulity again) to Guantanamo Bay, there "has been no official accounting of what happened to about 30 other 'ghost prisoners' who spent extended time in the custody of the CIA." Some, the story reports, "have disappeared without a trace."

That's one way to beat habeas. It's ruthlessly efficient; still, I hope the international courts will demur and obtain the necessary writs when ordering war-crimes trials of America's finest. And I believe they know precisely where to find at least one of them.

The second story almost provides comic relief, however. It seems the State Department has figured a way around all its unanswered "Help Wanted in Iraq" ads. "On Monday, 200 to 300 [Foreign Service officers] will be notified of their selection as 'prime candidates' for 50 open positions." Very open -- despite the potential for world adventure, however short-lived that adventure may be. In fact, I'm so career and financially challenged I'm thinking of applying myself, thereby sparing one of these poor drafted bastards. Dear Condi: Please forward app.

One imagines, this very morning, 2000 to 3000 frenzied and terrified fingers clutching Foreign Service desks in, oh, say, Europe and sunny Southeast Asia. Budding democratic wonderlands are a thrilling professional challenge, no doubt, but some are less attractive than others, and yet others, it seems, are worthy of mandatory professional fulfillment. The State Department has kindly announced that "those who receive the selection letters will have 10 days to file a written notice of objection," and one further imagines a departmental expectation of roughly 200 to 300 of said objections -- and don't you know the vast majority will be pure poetry.

But switching from those who mouth dedication to those proving it, we have the improperly placed third story: "Not 'Worth Another Soldier's Life.'"

Forget the triumphalist drivel of right-wing radio and soothing testimony of the general staff. Baghdad, according to those who know best, is a living hell -- a wretchedly barren, bombed-out snake pit of ethnic and sectarian anguish that translates "stay the course" into the hopelessly endless.

More than a year ago, when "soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, arrived in southwestern Baghdad," they possessed a good deal of that spirited patriotic hope. Now, after meeting reality, they are "deeply discouraged, by both the unabated hatred between rival sectarian fighters and the questionable will of the Iraqi government to work toward peaceful solutions."

So discouraged, in fact, the battalion sergeant observed: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

That place was, of course, never worth the first soldier's life. Nor the first dollar of the trillion and counting wasted. Nor America's world standing. Nor the secret prisons, nor the Gestapo tactics, nor the fraudulent menaces to democracy at home, nor any of the other countless official debaucheries.

Yet such is the loathsome folly the Bush administration has wrought; a folly that now blankets the front pages. Notwithstanding, there the administration sits -- securely in charge, despised and besieged by the world but virtually unopposed within the confines of the District of Columbia.

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Yesterday's actions were a warning shot, all right -- but it wasn't aimed at Iran

By imposing sanctions on Iran for its fomenting of violence in the Middle East, for its engagement in weapons proliferation, and for its attraction to nuclear technology for use as international muscle, the Bush administration yesterday hit the granddaddy of all hypocritical trifectas.

There was a time when the U.S. had some moral standing to preach and condemn. No longer. The world, quite simply, now sees us as the global bully and bad guy -- and when it's a 100-plus nations against one, there must be some merit to the world's perception. We're the 21st-century version of the Viking pillager, the British imperial lion, the Soviet cancer.

When it comes to fomenting violence, proliferating weapons of mass destruction and caressing, say, bunker bunkers with that little extra kick, the U.S. has no equal.

Nor will it tolerate one, no matter how far down the road any such equality or competition may lie.

Hence the Bush administration was in full dress rehearsal yesterday for yet another Middle East extravaganza of incalculably moronic proportions.

With the Commander Guy safely tucked away in the smoldering West, the seemingly less threatening Condi & Co. were left in charge of re-introducing all the preliminary hogwash of another war in the smoldering Middle East.

Gosh we're a peace-loving people, but our patience is forever tried by these little upstarts with disobedience and pushback in mind. So here we come, with mere rumblings at first, but then the sanctions, the unilateralism, the demand for Congressional resolutions, the drumbeats of propaganda, the nuclear references, the demonization of a singular human face, the preposterous urgencies.

Deja vu? Hell no. It's bloody verbatim -- an exact copy, a precise replay, a concrete reenactment of 2002. It is far, far more than any eerie sense of a replay.

Said Condi yesterday: "Unfortunately the Iranian government continues to spurn our offer of open negotiations." What she omitted was that all the U.S. asks is that Iran agree to our demands first, then we'll talk. It was but one of the many slimy misrepresentations for which the administration is known, past and present.

She also hammered away at the administration's determination to seek "a diplomatic solution." This, of course, in BushSpeak, means everything but. And we were, in fact, urged in every way, shape and form that we should now anticipate the use of force, since Condi's undersecretary sidekick, Nicholas Burns, assured us that "in no way, shape or form does it anticipate the use of force."

There's a little game played among many of the Beltway intellectual elite that I like to call the Sophistication Game. Its players are the oh-so worldly, the always level-headed, the calm and forever collected, the absolutely imperturbable. They are the wise and sophisticated; it is they who see beyond the hype and hysteria, and they are there for us, always, to lessen the temperature by advising composure -- even when manifest lunatics are in charge.

One such player in yesterday's tournament was Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Observed this calmest of the calmly astute: "This is a warning shot across the bow, not that the U.S. is going to invade Iran, but that Iran has pushed the level of escalation, particularly inside Iraq, to unacceptable levels. In many ways, this kind of warning is more a demonstration of restraint than a signal that we’re going to war."

Right, Anthony. And you've been living ... where, lately?

The Bush administration doesn't do subtle. It may think it's being clever and coy -- and it sure is clever of experts to read some cleverness into the Bush administration's profound lack of subtlety -- but the average man or woman on the street knows better these days.

Yesterday's charade was indeed a warning shot across the bow. But it wasn't hurled at Iran. It was, rather, fired in "Surrender, Dorothy" fashion over America -- originating in California and merely landing in D.C.

And the sky-written message could not have been plainer. We're off and running again.

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Leave Ann Coulter alone: She's doing just fine

Michael Livingston is upset. He's upset with you, me, Ann Coulter, all the minor Coulteresque ghouls of the nation, and the media -- especially the media (I think).

In a Washington Post/Newsweek piece titled "Most Christians to Left of Far Right," Livingston, president of the National Council of Churches, pounces on pretty much everyone for paying attention to the villainous Ms. Coulter -- an opinion piece previewed with infinite whimsy and paradox on the WP's front page with the alternate title, "Stop Looking at Her."

Research, you see, ominously "shows the younger generation, ages 16-29, views Christianity as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned and too political," writes Livingston, even though "most Christians believe in an authentic, inclusive and welcoming gospel."

Why then the unfavorable perception of Christianity by the young? Because, says Livingston, of fascistic harpies like Ann Coulter, who, masquerading as a fountain of the One True Faith, "has dismissed most of the Bible and the words of Jesus defending the poor, the widow, the prisoner -- the least among us -- and spewed her venom that has little or nothing to do with orthodox Christianity."

Of the latter, there is no doubt. But with that, the blame-laying then gets a little fuzzy. For after citing Coulter's most recent imbecility regarding Christians as "perfected Jews," Livingston shifts gears a bit, noting "there used to be a time when such words of hatred and intolerance were not given any public platform in the mainstream media. No longer."

The author doesn't explicitly lecture the media to dismantle the platform, but he does dance all around the admonition. "Now we have newspapers and news channels giving extended coverage to those perverting the gospel with attitudes alien to its reconciling heart," writes Livingston; and, sadly, "Ms. Coulter and her ilk are the ones to whom the media gives most of its attention."

I may be unfairly accusing Mr. Livingston of advocating media self-censorship, but if that indeed is what he yearns for, or suggests, then he has erred in turning history and its lessons on their head.

The Ann Coulters of this country -- the warped dominionists, the whacko militarists, the preposterous theocrats and reactionary Gilded Agers-- have always been with us, in numbers and spirit. For years they labored in isolation, in their right-wing bunkers and hallelujah havens, incestuously breeding their philosophies of hate, liberal-scapegoatism and authoritarianism. In time, they raised money, established their unthinkable think tanks and propaganda centers, chose their office-seeking candidates, and thus dispensed in judicious portions their simplistic and seductive themes. And all to the welcome reception of many non-ideological folks who failed to appreciate the depths of lunacy with which they were politically aligning.

By the late 1970s the amassing Coulterite legions began to score electoral points; and, as we now horrifyingly know, things would slime downhill from there. But, they originally caught progressives off guard, and largely because the media weren't paying attention. When the media noticed them at all, they dismissed them as the loons they were -- so they multiplied in darkness.

Had the media dug and exposed from the beginning -- had they, that is, directly broadcast and printed the views and motivations of the ideological originators, and not just those of their polished, political mouthpieces -- things might well have been different.

So you keep on spewing, Ann Coulter. You keep right on saying all the detestable things you perhaps even believe, so that the average American can see the buffoonish and ugly face of the religio-political underside. And you, dear media, keep right on allowing her and her kind plenty of airtime and space with which to hang themselves.

As Mr. Livingston himself concedes, while seemingly missing the why, "There are some signs that the toxic message of the extreme right of American Christians may be faltering."

That's the beauty of media exposure. In time, it tends to devour the offensively unhinged.

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No more leeway for Bush's apparatchiks: Gut the administration

Yesterday, with respect to Bush's attorney general nominee, Michael Mukasey, there appeared in the New York Times an op-ed so philosophically fundamental, so historically faithful and so immeasurably sensible, it was, I should hope, forced into the hands and before the eyes of each and every Senate Judiciary Committee member by staffers who've managed to retain some devotion to constitutional propriety.

It was contributed by Jed Rubenfeld, a Yale Law professor who, despite his lofty scholasticism, displayed an academically unique talent for writing in plain English. And the idea behind his writing was just as plain and unmistakably clear: There looms before the judiciary committee yet another intolerable menace to the rule of law -- courtesy, of course, of the intolerably menacing George W. Bush.

Rubenfeld was more than a trifle disturbed at Mr. Mukasey's response last week to the Senate panel's question -- one that, by mere virtue of its need to be asked, shows how far off the constitutional track we've careened -- about whether the president of the United States is obligated to obey the law.

The nominee's reply: "That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country."

Any response, as Rubenfeld implied in his piece, that kicks off with a "That depends" should have triggered an abrupt halt to the proceedings, right then and there. Any mind not tragically disheveled by the ludicrous arguments of unitary executive theory would have stopped Mukasey in his muddled tracks. And any committee member not prone to collapse in incredulity at those arguments has no business sitting as a member of that vetting assemblage.

As Rubenfeld noted -- one imagines with head in hand, as in, "I can't believe I'm having to point this out" -- Mukasey's answer was "a dangerous confusion and distortion of the single most fundamental principle of the Constitution -- that everyone, including the president, is subject to the rule of law."

Just in case the judiciary committee still failed to grasp that singularly elementary point, the good professor repeated it, and this time with exasperated emphasis: "Under the American Constitution, federal statutes, not executive decisions in the name of national security, are 'the supreme law of the land.' It's that simple."

Were I a committee member, on the aforementioned Q&A alone I likely would have concluded my infamous 15 minutes with Mr. Mukasey by wishing him a pleasant and continued retirement in New York.

But, true to accommodating form, the Senate panel has instead taken the stern action of sending the nominee a letter, requesting clarifications, specifically on the federal judge's bewilderment as to whether virtually drowning someone constitutes torture. And, further true to form, and however outrageous, "it is still widely expected that he will be confirmed to the Justice Department job."

If I differ with Professor Rubenfeld at all, that difference arises from his exortation that "before voting to confirm [Mukasey] as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the Senate should demand that he retract [his] statement" regarding presidential supremacy.

Hooey. All the president's men have demonstrated a gleeful willingness to retract whatever one wishes them to retract -- so they can then proceed, privately and with a clean bill of legal health, with whatever unconstitutional machinations they had cooked up in the first place. Those of any honor have long since departed from this criminal gang, and now spend their days denouncing and warning against it. And any still willing to sign on have already tipped their hand, Mukasey included.

Gut this administration, senators. Confirm no one. Position it leaderless and disarrayed and eviscerated in its waning days. The potential harm of top-level vacancies isn't nearly as foreboding as the absolute certainty of yet more lawlessness from any future Bush appointees.

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It is time, at long last, for Congress to ask: Is the president mad?

This NYT lead struck me as more exhortation than reportage:

"President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve $196 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other national security programs, setting the stage for a new confrontation with Democrats over the administration’s handling of Iraq."

If only that were the case. A "new confrontation" -- the implication being that we've witnessed tough confrontations in the past; real confrontations beyond the bedazzlement of swindling stagecraft. Yet "a confrontation" that transcends mere words -- one with meat and muscle on its bones; one with some depth and kick -- remains as what's needed.

But we know the routine. Instead, Democrats will fume and froth. They'll react "with dismay and anger." They'll pound their well-beaten chests and threaten all manner of responsible confrontation. Then they'll fold like a cheap, unraveling suit, just before hurling every penny of the $196 billion at the administration.

We know the routine, we've read the script, we've seen this undignified act. If Congress means to simply lie down, again, then let's just cut right to the appropriations process and be done with it. It was grand theatre before, when there was some smidgen of suspense to behold. The reruns, however, fail to captivate or enlighten.

Yet, it seems to me, this potential confrontation could take on an entirely new script -- courtesy the administration itself -- if only Democrats would seize a bit of the theatrical in presenting the recently tweaked. They don't need to merely go through the same old motions, repeat the same rehearsed lines, and suffer the same frustrations. They could, instead, vastly reframe the war-spending debate. They could do it in a heartbeat, and all they'd actually be doing is saying what you, I, and the world already knows. All they need say is ...

The Bush administration is nuts. Bonkers. Irretrievably demented. There are madmen at the helm. They have put their dementia on public display, and whoever believes Congress should subsidize their insanity is as crazy as they are.

These aren't just words, some sort of demagogic hysteria tailored for political advantage. For there is, in fact, tangible, psychiatric evidence of the executive condition.

Within only the last week, the president signaled with a smirk an infinitely incoherent warning about the coming of World War III -- a global conflagration resulting merely from diplomatic frustration with a second-rate power that poses no grave threat. And we all know the empirical data on the president's signals.

Meanwhile, the vice president was unleashed to reinforce the administration's increasingly overt intent. Said Mr. Cheney Sunday: "The entire international community" -- meaning, of course, the United States alone -- "cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions"; hence the Bush administration is "prepared to impose serious consequences." The latter, needless to say, is spelled w-a-r.

That is, another war -- another on top of the two losing wars in which we're engaged, another trillion, thousands more in lives lost, more international isolation and rebuke, and, doubtlessly, more, if not all, of the Constitution trashed. Yet what staggers the rational mind has been laid out, right before our eyes, with tangible expressiveness and deliberate aforethought.

And if those stated intentions don't square with the clinical contours of definitional madness, I frankly don't know what would. Thus before appropriating one cent for the president's current psychosis, Congress should ask and answer -- openly and with licensed head-candlers testifying before it and confirming the seemingly manifest -- "Is the president mad?"

This is no longer about positioning for political victory in 2008. This is no longer about scoring points with this base or that. This, bluntly, is about rescuing the nation from permanent destruction at the hands of a likely certifiable madman.

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The Bush Doctrine -- Not Intended for Others' Home Use

Every now and then, even politicians manage to say something in the vernacular of searing depth -- something that reduces the abstractly complex to its most fundamental and material essence.

This happened yesterday. It came not from an American pol, but from a Turk, and his astute reflection on the developing contours of the Bush administration's plucky efforts to remold the Middle East could not have been more philosophically inclusive and properly reductionist: "It's a mess."

Yes, it is indeed a mess, and there is no messier element at the moment than the situation that lies on the Turkish-Iraqi border, a region primed for even greater inflammation by the Bush administration's having eliminated any effective Iraqi government or control. Kurdish terrorists -- our news reports call them "militants," the delicate alternative for quasi- or wannabe friends -- continue to strike inside Turkey, and the Turks have about had enough.

They -- a NATO ally of ours -- now wish to launch military action against the pesky Kurds inside Iraq, the latter's base of operations. Think Taliban; think al Qaeda; think Afghanistan; think not preemption, but justified retaliation against a foreign foe determined to do vast harm to the Turkish homefolks. Think, in short, a Turkish version of the Bush Doctrine in extremis -- a universal, God-given doctrine written in the stars for use by all decent, freedom-loving peoples. Right?

Think again. For the doctrine, it is now clear, comes with a whopper of a stipulation: only the Bush administration is warranted in its use -- ever. Other decent, freedom-loving peoples can shove it, even when terrorist attacks against them are deadly and sustained. Those folks -- the other folks -- should be patient.

Says the latest report: "A brazen ambush by Kurdish militants" -- there's that softener again -- "that left at least 12 Turkish soldiers dead touched off a major escalation in Turkey-Iraq tensions on Sunday, bringing fears that Turkey would retaliate immediately by sending troops across the border into Iraq."

Seems sensible, even ineluctable, by all recent accounts. Territorial integrity is being violated, innocent lives are being ruthlessly taken, national honor and national security and democracy are at stake, a manly and muscular response is the only option -- the world has been force-fed all the immense rationalizations for years, by you-know-who.

"But," continued the report, "Turkey’s prime minister said he delayed a decision, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice personally intervened."

I (almost) would have given a tour of duty in Iraq to have heard her desperate pleas; to have heard her arguments against herself, and more profoundly, against her own doctrinaire boss. But all I can do is merely imagine the prime minister stuttering his interruptions at a machine-gun pace: "But that's hypocri ...," "Whoa, that's hypocri ...," "Wait a minute! that's hypocrit...."

Meanwhile, our other allies in patience also called for cooler heads. "We are looking for peace, not war," said Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, "and to solve problems peacefully."

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention this little item. Just as the militant Kurds were launching their latest terrorist attack, and just before we urged a peaceful resolution and the need for possibly thoughtless belligerents to seek only a diplomatic endgame, "the U.S. military said its troops killed 49 fighters in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.... Iraqi officials and residents of the vast Shiite enclave ... said 13 people were killed and all of the victims were innocent civilians, including children."

But let us not bother with trying to square the circle. It's just the Bush administration's world-famous hypocrisy in action.

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