Justice delayed

The Bushists run out the clock on another legal proceeding. For a long time now, we've needed to speed up the glacial pace of the courts in this country.

Lessons of Watergate

Can anyone still believe that the White House was not involved in destruction of recordings of torture? No one who isn't in the middle of a do-it-yourself colonscopy.

Basically, this story describes Bandini, Lambert, & Locke negotiating with the CIA. Addington, Gonzales, and Miers were all involved. You know which direction the orders were travelling, even if they might have been in the form of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Update: Really from the New York Times, which finally lays out the prisoners' legal rationale for including these non-Guantánamo interrogation tapes in the order about Gitmo prisoners: al Zubaydah may have implicated them during torture.

More on "Justice Denied"

See Better late than never.

The reason I didn’t want Miers was her complete personal fealty to Duhbya. Mr. President, you want the prerogatives of an elected king, whatever you say I’ll agree. This – not Iraq, not for heaven’s sake abortion, not even the galloping plutocracy – is the number one issue of our day. All the others are symptoms of the fundamental dysfunction of our polity, which is slouching into fascism. Are we going to govern ourselves, or are we so tired of the petty details and hard facts that we’re going to hand over the power to corrupt men like Darth Cheney to do with us what they will – so long as we get to watch Survivor?

Did the Times advocate a filibuster of Alito? That’s the real question. As Jimmy Malone said while choking on his own blood in The Untouchables, “What are you prepared to do about it?” The media has a mania for bipartisanship (‘Broderism’), which mainly translates into Democratic restraint and lots of tongue-clucking about the Republicans’ lack of restraint. My mania is for Constitutional democracy, and that’s not a value I’ll compromise in the vain hope of comity with a bunch of would-be tyrants, even in the name of Liebermanesque bipartisanship. Especially not in the name of anyone who enables Republican abuses like Lieberman.

Too bad the Washington Democrats still hope for comity. They should at every turn be fighting political war instead of thinking about responsible governance. The only path to that is to throw the rascals out and install some lesser rascals.

That includes judges. We need to clean house by all legal means – and some extralegal means, too. You think any of the Supremes are on the Palfrey phone list? God, I hope so.

By the way, I think David Vitter is toast. Another Harvard man bites … the dust.