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In the last two weeks we have seen multiple examples of what civil liberties advocates have been warning about over and over again. The infrastructure of the police state, put together behind the scenes and with secret rooms and fusion centers, was put on display in a number of different places.

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Beginning with his nomination for Attorney General I had reservations about Michael Mukasey, and he has consistently lived down to my worst expectations. I did not like the fact that the Senate seemingly had no opportunity to give advice on the selection (beyond what appears to be secret meetings with Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein), nor did I like his apparent equanimity about brutality. The best name I heard floated was Mike DeWine, the recently-defeated Republican Senator from Ohio. He is solidly Republican and consistently voted with the President (one of the reasons he lost) so it would have satisfied the "to the victor goes the spoils" nature of these things, but he was also a known quantity to the Senate. He had worked with almost everyone there and as far as I know was well regarded. But beneath the surface something I couldn't quite pin down was buzzing around like a mosquito, and it all fell into place last week while reading The Dark Side. Jane Mayer quotes an anonymous CIA officer on page 180 as he disparages Jose Rodriguez Jr, then-head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center (CTC): "[in the] administration, loyalty is the new competence."

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I am slowly reading The Dark Side and so was especially struck by this from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers: "If there's any comfort to be found in Mayer's account, or in any of the stories coming out about this administration's overreach, it's in the stories of those who didn't go crazy." We are going through an extraordinarily trying time for our nation's ideals, and while I have focused almost exclusively on the authors of these trials there are some uplifting stories as well. Some individuals have been willing to resist the cruel and authoritarian "War on Terror" mindset when confronted (sometimes unexpectedly) by it, and they deserve our admiration. Here are some examples.

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If it is true that our earliest experiences are the most influential (child is father to the man and all that) then the sixties are the dominant years for our current leaders. It has since become a cliché that the era never really ended and continues to fundamentally shape our discourse, but I only agree to a point. After all, every generation is shaped by the events of its time and those events exert an ongoing influence. On the other hand, the turbulence then does make it more influential than other periods. Starting with the Kennedy assassination and ending with Watergate there was an unpopular draft, the Vietnam war, additional traumatic political murders and other momentous events that have cast a very long shadow. And of course the generation formed in this cauldron was also part of a huge population spike, which imprinted the swirl of controversy even more firmly on the national psyche. But even without the demographic component it was destined to be much-discussed because it was marked by contentiousness that has not been matched until perhaps recently. (Side note to today's young people: Hope you like those arguments you're having! You can look forward to another forty years of them.)

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Prairie Weather inspired this week's post. I have been unsuccessfully trying to write about what may be a vast, unexamined record of wrongdoing from the administration, and a brief exchange started by PW finally got me unstuck. Stuart Taylor Jr. has argued for pardons, Cass Sunstein agrees and Victoria Toensing has added (via) her own dubious logic to the drumbeat. A consensus has developed among political and media elites that no good purpose would be served by enforcing the law(!) and so for the sake of a smooth transfer of power and a calming of the political waters in the capitol we must let it all pass.

I have written previously about how the administration will be more concerned with covering its tracks than anything else in its final months, and recently the pace has picked up. Maybe the passage of the new FISA bill kicked it off in the same way Memorial Day informally starts summer in America (and Labor Day ends it - you can keep all your fancy solstices and equinoxes). Whatever the cause though, the effort is underway to run out the clock, cloud the law and excuse the guilty. A key leader is Michael Mukasey. He has already shown a willingness to be a demagogue on terrorism and an apologist for torture. Now he is wants Congress to ignore the Boumediene decision with a leap of logic that would - literally - create the permanent environment of a police state:

So was born, lived a little space, and died the Progressive party. At its birth it caused the nomination, by the Democrats, and the election, by the people, of Woodrow Wilson. At its death it brought about the nomination of Charles E. Hughes by the Republicans. It forced the writing into the platforms of the more conservative parties of principles and programmes of popular rights and social regeneration. The Progressive party never attained to power, but it wielded a potent power.

- Harold Howland

The two party system in America is remarkably durable. Just the phrase "third party" conjures up images of John Anderson, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and George Wallace. These are all people who exited or were never inside the system. It implies actors at the margins engaged in Quixotic (though see here and here) attempts to fundamentally alter conventional politics. It also postulates two parties as though they are fixed poles on the political map. Nearly everything about the way we talk and think about American politics assumes the context of two major parties fighting for majority control.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post. A copy of this was mailed as a letter to the editor Thursday morning.

My parents always subscribed to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, so I grew up around newspapers; they were as regular a part of our household as our cats. As a kid I'd look at the Sunday comics, and later on the 1980 Browns would prompt me to grab the newspaper every day. I first started reading "real" news in 1984, when the front page of the second section had a columnist slot called "Focal Point". Mike Royko was featured three times a week, and when that year's Olympics rolled around he touched off a huge controversy with a series of columns about how he and his buddies decided which of the women's teams to cheer for based on which ones had the nicest butts. (Memorable headline from a column he wrote at the conclusion: "The Bottom Line") When his column moved inside to the Op-Ed pages I moved with him. So yes, I first started going to the most high-minded section of the paper when my teen eyes were lured there by T&A.

Our President seems to believe not in oversight but in "accountability moments" every four years when the population gives a strict up-or-down judgment on his performance. A thumbs up means a mandate for the entire platform. In some cases like Social Security and immigration the changes are shot down by a growing popular revolt, but essentially the whole package is considered affirmed. At that point Congress passes laws as directed by the President to properly implement the platform, and each policy is a black box to be blessed in the broadest possible terms with no debate or review involved. If Congress doesn't like that setup it is free to use the power of the purse to shut off funding and force voters to pick sides; the loser gets run into a ditch.

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Thinking back, it is hard to believe Ross Perot nearly upturned the two party system in 1992. He received almost 19% of the vote, which was more than an independent had received since 1912 - when a former President ran. Perot had a staggering array of disadvantages: The absence of even a bare bones third party infrastructure, no political experience whatsoever, an untelegenic face and somewhat high pitched (and grating) voice, a running mate who seemed simultaneously authentic and buffoonish, and a continually prickly reaction to the prying and publicity that comes with any serious bid for the White House. And then of course there was the epic freakout. Ahead in the polls, he abruptly dropped out of the race, then dropped back in several weeks later and accused the Republicans of trying to sabotage his daughter's wedding. He seemed, literally, to be having a nervous breakdown in full public view. And after all that he still captured nearly a fifth of the electorate!

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U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled this week that the White House's Office of Administration (OA) does not have to turn over documents relating to the disappearance of potentially millions of emails. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and in her decision Kollar-Kotelly wrote "the Court concludes that OA is not an agency subject to the FOIA". CREW plans to appeal.

She acknowledged that until the administration decided otherwise "OA considered itself an agency subject to the FOIA and operated as such." Why should a decades-long practice under Republican and Democratic administrations alike be so casually disregarded? Considering the reverence for precedents in the judicial system it would seem logical that longstanding conventions elsewhere would be granted some measure of respect. Instead she concludes that even though the OA always considered itself bound by FISA and responded accordingly, all that was required to end this long-running practice was for the current President to order it.

Scott McClellan's book has started some extremely interesting conversations. His allegations are not especially important by themselves, mainly because it is easy to suspect ulterior motives. A number of critics have noted he has no natural allies in Washington and could not expect a soft landing at a lobbying firm or think tank; the only way for him to cash in is with blockbuster sales. Another reason could be self-justification, which may well be one of the few high growth areas created by the current administration. The broad contours of this Presidency are clearly visible now, and even the most blinkered partisans know the judgment of history will be extraordinarily harsh. As an amusing consequence there is already a budding industry of entertaining attempts to show how successful it has been (or will be). For example, Ross Douthat floated a trial balloon suggesting that if Iraq is not a complete hellhole thirty years from now the conventional wisdom will be to credit the forty third President. It was almost immediately swatted down and then essentially retracted (via). All I can add to the discussion is to refer you to John Maynard Keynes.

I spent two years in Tanzania teaching secondary school math as a Peace Corps volunteer. The only Swahili left in my head is greetings and curses (one of the latter is substantially more offensive than anything we've come up with in English) along with a few memorable phrases. One phrase is "bahati mbaya" which literally translates as "bad luck." The reason it's memorable is because it was also used to describe completely predictable bad outcomes. If you started drawing a bath, for some reason left the house for a few hours and came back to a flooded living area...bahati mbaya. It is a wonderfully diplomatic way to avoid saying, wow was that stupid. It is in that spirit that I write: This is the bahati mbaya President.

Last year Kung Fu Monkey produced one of the great political analyses of our time in his essay on shamelessness. Among other points he wrote "[y]ou reveal a man's corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do?

This week Joe Klein wrote a post that did not attempt to hide his disdain for his critics. While he showed a willingness to outline his reporting process and address concerns raised in his comments, he did so in an extremely defensive, thin-skinned and condescending tone. He also made the following memorably clueless assertion: "Tell me where I've been misled by my sources." His commenters quickly pointed out his factually challenged reporting on the FISA debate. They also brought up a number of other great points (Jay Rosen and Jay Ackroyd in particular), and if you don't go through all of them let's just say it is safe to be skeptical of the whole environment elite media operates in.