Thanks Again, Ralph

Altercation

"What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently."

This man could have been president... but hey, Nader preferred Bush. Thanks Ralph.

Naturally, the Right's response is to call him crazy. (Raising the fact that we have a constitution will do that every time.)

Meanwhile, that illegal domestic spying thing, well, it didn't work out so well. Virtually without exception, the wiretaps "led to dead ends or innocent Americans." Here.

Michael Kinsley writes: "Here, once again, the Bush administration helps to make the softies' case. They could have jumped through the required hoops and be wiretapping away about five minutes later. Or if they didn't like the way some court was interpreting the law, they could have gotten a law tailor-made from Congress just the way they liked. ("I'll take it medium rare, with cuffs but no pleats, and hold the right to a jury trial.") But that was too much trouble.

And Hitchens makes the case that Bush wanted to blow up Al-Jezeera, here.

The memorandum is actually a five-page transcript stamped "Top Secret." It describes a meeting at the White House on April 16, 2004, between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. At that meeting, which took place while desperately hard fighting was in progress in the Iraqi town of Fallujah, Bush mooted the idea of taking out the headquarters of Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar. The network's correspondents inside the city had been transmitting lurid footage of extreme violence. The exchange apparently puts Blair in a good light, in that he dissuaded the president from any such course of action and was assisted in this by Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state.

And thanks again, Ralph.

Oops, I invaded the wrong country.

We destroyed the country in order to destroy it.

A Nightmare Prediction: I was about to allow myself to be in a good mood about the fact that Mr. Casey is going to kick Mr. Santorum's posterior in the next election, here, but then I realized that if you were John McCain, and you wanted to re-assure your party that they could depend on you to be just as extremist and unreality-based as they can, (and of course, you weren't), plus you had fought cancer in your life and were already older than seventy, and plus, Santorum, who is from another part of the country, is going to lose anyway, then who would you pick to be your VP? It's another "Ashcroft manages to lose to a dead man" all over again. Of course the worst of all possible worlds is that McCain's medical troubles make it impossible to serve during that period and this guy takes over.

I still say "Gore/Obama 08," but I think McCain will be nearly impossible to beat and I've changed my mind about him being un-nominatable. (Jeb is the wild card, by the way.) But if McCain does turn out to be the nominee, maybe Democrats had just better nominate Hillary and get it over with....