Friday's incredible news dump

Radley has the details...so far.

Play him off, keyboard cat...

Yeah, Bush-Cheney Republicanism happens.

SNL Cheney open

Republican incongruity

Daniel Larison hits the nail on the head:

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

This situation creates a strange incongruity. In one breath, conservatives will invoke a baseless claim that Bush’s excessive spending lost them the country, and in the next they will defend to the last Bush’s decisions as Commander-in-Chief. Yet these were the decisions that, more than anything else, led to Democratic victories and the GOP’s now toxic reputation. What is more, everyone outside the conservative bubble knows the narrative that mainstream conservatives tell themselves is false, which makes conservative professions of fiscal austerity and continued hawkishness even less likely to win public support.

As much as I would like to see some real fiscal austerity and defense of personal liberty, I'm not so deluded as to think Republican deficiencies in these areas are why they've fallen so low.

National security conservatism is a largely unmitigated disaster, clearly (See: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) but general incompetence and lowbrow anti-intellectualism bear their share of blame (See: Bush, Palin, Huckabee)

Eight signs Dick is running for president

Daily Beast has the lulz.

Take the Dick Cheney quiz

Cheney for President

Check out one of Ross Douthat's first regular NYT columns...

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

He's right, in hindsight.

Cheneyism dies another death

Unreligious Right is outraged the U.S. military isn't able to "apprehend people in foreign countries, far from any Afghan battlefield, and then bring them to a theater of war" for indefinite detention without judicial review.

Our judiciary, he says, should not "have any say over military operations."

I mentioned our system of checks and balances, but as he concludes in the comments:

A check is different from a usurpation. This is a usurpation. Do you think the president should start deciding what type of prison sentences judges can hand out? Would that be a check on judicial power?

Why, yes I do, and yes it would be. We tend to call them "pardons", "reprieves", or "commutations". That'd be from Article 2, Section 2.  Great example of how our checks and balances work, buster.  He continues:

If the military is fighting to give foreign prisoners they capture access to the U.S. Court system, you might want to tell them, they'll probably be surprised to learn that's part of their mission. I'm sure it will be good for morale.

Damn.  Do they need a constitutional primer as well? I just assumed maybe they'd read it before solemnly swearing to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

As for where the judiciary gets its powers to rule on military detentions, here's Article 3 Section 2 with my emphasis:

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

As pertains to Congress making such laws, Article 1 Section 8:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Now I'm no lawyer, but I have no reason to think the judge in the case we're discussing wasn't acting within the lawful authority prescribed by the Constitution and Congress.  If Mr. UNRR or any of you know of one then I'd be interested to hear it.

Update: publius explains this rulling well, I think. Basically it's narrow and only affects situations identical to Guantanamo Bay, applying the Supreme Court’s Boumediene case from last year.

GOP to Dr. Evil: go back to bunker

The Hill:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.

Displeased with the former vice-president's recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he's hurting GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings.

The veep, who showed a penchant for secrecy during eight years in the White House,has popped up in media interviews to defend the Bush-Cheney record while suggesting that the country is not as safe under President Obama.

(more)

Sunlight on torture

We may soon get the memos. It's little wonder Cheney and other neocons are squirming.

Dick Cheney, now officially a dick

It was bound to happen.

More SNL

There's also a Cheney interview.

The torture transition

Bush 41: "he passed the test." Did he?

Here's Yglesias:

The oddity of terrorism as an enterprise is that, in essence, it’s an effort by a weaker party to trick the stronger party into weakening himself by engaging in panicky overreactions. In particular, though 9/11 had an appalling cost in terms of lives and money we’ve actually seen a somewhat larger cost in lives and much larger cost in money in our response to those events.

And Fallows (who lives in China):

On matters of policy, he revealed himself to be as isolated and out of touch as his critics (including me) would have assumed all along. Two illustrations: he hotly challenged the premise of one question that his policies had made America less prestigious and respected around the world, saying that was just the view of some "elites" and other pantywaists in part of Europe. Go to China! he said. They still respect us there. Yes, sort of. As I've written many times in the Atlantic, China does not seem in any deep way "anti-American," and they generally think US-China relations are good. But no thinking person has the slightest doubt that the Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib policies, in particular, have hurt America's image badly here as they have in most other places. To say what the President did indicates how carefully he has been protected from any unfiltered feedback from the real world.

This is clearly a failure.

Rewriting history

Cheney does his best. Dick.

Meanwhile NRO gushes that he'll be missed.

Um. No. This is the man who masterminded the Iraq war and torture regime.

Prosecute him for crimes against humanity.

The arrogance of Cheney and the appeals court of history

Just staggering. And he thinks Bush will be popular in 30 years.

Sullivan recalled a comment on Tacitus:

It is not, as I gather, that Tacitus lacks veracity. What he lacks is what in the Thirties used to be called "the long view" of history. But to minds of a certain sensitivity "the long view" is the falsest historical view of all, and indeed the insistence on the length of perspective is intended precisely to overcome sensitivity---seen from sufficient distance, it says, the corpse and the hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and eventually they even begin to compose themselves into a "meaningful pattern."