I'm trying not to be too paranoid. Still - who can manage it? Take a look at The Whiskey Bar today: a story about borrowing tactics from the Nazis for humiliating and breaking prisoners; a story about a soldier in Wisconsin attending a Bush rally in uniform - with 500 of his soldiers... or Crooked Timber with another post on the torture memo... What is this?

That memo - look at some actual quotes from the thing:

"Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the president."

"As this power is inherent in the President, exercise of it by subordinates would be best if it can be shown to have been derived from the President's authority through Presidential directive or other writing."

Look at that - is that something other than saying that during wartimes, the president is simply not subject to the laws? and that "following orders" is sufficient defense against American or international law? That's stunning. It's bad enough that it's a gross misreading of the constitution, and an overt move to usurp the powers of congress to the executive branch - it's virtually a repudiation of civilization itself. Now, I don't know whether this memo was ever implemented, whether someone along the line said, "thanks, but this isn't very useful, we don't actually want to overthrow the government" - the evidence isn't encouraging. It's clear that the Bush administration drastically lowered the bar against using torture and other illegal acts - and has been using the full range of defenses to avoid responsibility: hiding it, then lying when they were caught, then playing stupid when they were caught in the lies (the Reagan defense!), then, of course, blaming a bunch of enlisted men (and - not accidentally, I'd guess, an enlisted woman) - as every defense crumbles, they find a new one - and I'm sure the "following orders" line will be there eventually. Not that any of them intend to take responsiblity at the top.

It's also true that Reagan's death came at the best possible time for this band of vipers - they could run on Reagan's legacy for a while - for the last week, they had Reagan's picture up on the Bush web site... it's gone now, but...

Here's Jack Balkin offering professional analysis of the memo, and the rest of the torture story. And a new story at top, that the orders for the torture (as a policy) came from the top - "senior Pentagon civilians"....

I don't know. It seems to me that we are very close to the point where a vote for Bush is literally a vote against the constitution. This story might be that point - who knows. Can they get worse? They keep getting worse, they've managed to get worse steadily over the last year and a half. Pathetic.

I saw the movie, Control Room today - about Al Jazeera - one of their reporters, talking about who could stop the United States from taking over the world (basically) said he trusted the American people and the American constitution - the Americans would stop the United States. Let us hope he is right. Let us hope that Bush is not America.