With only five or six games left (depending on your team) in the regular season, it’s time again to re-visit my previous screed on the NHL standings.
Your marching orders have arrived. The Cliff’s notes version? Gingrich good. Thompson bad.
(After all, Gingrich has done such a fine job of exemplifying the Christian ideal of the sanctity of marriage…)
H/T: TPM
All-linky-no-thinky, but Publius says it best:
If my critique of the Bush administration could be expressed in a single sentence, it would be this — they ignore and attack restraints on their power. This is the foundational conceptual thread that binds together so many of the scandals and controversies we’ve seen over the past few years. International law constraining your actions? Ignore it. War crimes statute limiting your interrogation methods? Ignore it (then delete it). Don’t like part of a congressionally-enacted statute? Issue a signing statement and ignore it. Pesky FISA cramping your style? Declare it unconstitutional. Geneva Convention got you down? Call it quaint. Is your habeas flaring up again? Delete it. Having problems with a special prosecutor? Lie to him. Are certain Democrats political threats? Prosecute them, or suppress their political base through fraud investigations or through not enforcing the Voting Rights Act. And if U.S. Attorneys refuse to go along? Fire them.
I could go on, but you get the point. And many similar critiques could be leveled against the Republican Party more generally on everything from Bush v. Gore, to the Texas redistricting, to the Medicare Rx bill vote, to the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, to the nuclear option, etc.
Note that these problems go beyond ignoring the rule of law. The rule of law is one type of restraint, but it’s not the only one. Deleting habeas, for instance, isn’t really ignoring the rule of law (like, say, the NSA scandal), it’s changing the law to maximize executive power. Again, the common theme here is ignoring or attacking that which prevents you from doing what you want to do. It’s almost like watching small children – they see something they want, and they try to get it without worrying about legal or procedural constraints.
In the interests of fairness, he adds (correctly, in my estimation):
It is inherent in the very nature of man to abuse power. Even if the progressive netroots became magically institutionalized and assumed control of all political branches tomorrow, they too would eventually abuse power if it went unchecked. Thus, don’t assume that my critiques are directed solely at Republicans – the critiques simply recognize our shared universal weaknesses.
If only more on the right would recognize this truism.
UPDATE: I was remiss in not encouraging everyone to read the entire linked post, and also in pointing out that the first excerpt was not the point of the linked post, but that I was merely linking it because it succinctly expressed the major problem I’ve had with the Bush Administration for years.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
