I finally got to this essay on the expansion of presidential power and the growth of the national security state — and how it relates to the war on terror. I highly recommend it.
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You hate to have to do something like this, but the people we elect apparently can’t be trusted to make sure that pension contributions are actually used for pension payments. So we’ll just have to take their ability to run the three-card monte away from them.
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Dan Froomkin hits the nail on the head in his White House Watch column in The Washington Post.
The president’s “offer to make senior aides available for private interviews about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys” fails the smell test because “it would deny the public any reliable record of what was said.”
It would remove the pressure from senior aides, most notably White House political guru Karl Rove, to come clean on their involvement in the firings — while denying the public an opportunity to assess their veracity.
And it would make Congress a party to keeping important information obscured from the kind of public scrutiny that comes when journalists and bloggers have a chance to untangle the skillful evasions so common to this White House.
This is a president who likes to tightly control the little bit of information that gets out there and an administration that has engaged in bullying of critics (the Plame leak), has pushed lies and distortions — all to defend its distorted notion of executive priviledge and power.
It is because of this kind of behavior that George W. Bush’s presidency will go down in history as the one that posed the most serious threat to the Constitution.
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The title of this post is actually a line from Josh Marshall’s blog post on Tony Snow’s press conference this morning. Here’s an update from him. I like the first post better.
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Hank Kalet 