The New “Black Hole”: Bagram.

“The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence. I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary.” Me too, Senator Obama, me too.

In a decisive break with his campaign stances and the best indicator yet that this administration is now happily perpetuating deeply troubling Bush-era policies, the President wins the right to hold detainees indefinitely in Bagram — the difference from the Boumediene decision on Gitmo being that Bagram is a “war zone.” (And Ben Franklin’s admonition aside, that’s an excuse you hear quite a bit these days.)

FWIW, Politico’s Josh Gerstein — while bending over backwards, as per the Village norm, not to call torture “torture” — suggests civil liberties concerns are overblown here, but check out his reasoning: “The Obama administration…has, so far, resisted seeking a full-scale preventive detention law that would apply to future captives. Instead, it has pleaded with civil liberties and human rights groups not to oppose some legal mechanism to allow the continued detention of Al Qaeda captives, at least some of whom may be untriable because of aggressive interrogations many view as torture.“

Oh, please. We have to hold them forever because we tortured them? How utterly and completely effed up is that? As Stephen Colbert well put it: “It’s essentially the same stance taken by George Bush. With one important difference: Obama makes the kids like it.”

Kagan’s Time to Shine.

“‘I am confident that she’s a solid, reliable modern Democrat…She’s not George McGovern or whoever the liberal left of the Democratic party would want, but the left of the Democratic party isn’t where the party is any more. She’s a good, solid Clinton-Obama Democrat.‘”

Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Particularly that she’ll be replacing the irreplaceable John Paul Stevens. In any case, President Obama has made his second pick for the Supreme Court, and it is his Solicitor General and former Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan. “As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.“

Making the progressive case for Kagan: Larry Lessig, an old friend of hers: “The Kagan I know is a progressive…[T]he core of Kagan’s experience over the past two decades has been all about moving people of different beliefs to the position she believes is correct. Not by compromise, or caving, but by insight and strength. I’ve seen her flip the other side.” Lessig expounds on this coalition-builder argument here: “To hear the liberals talk about it, it sounds like they think we need a Thomas or Scalia of the Left…But nobody who understands the actual dynamics of the Supreme Court could actually believe that such a strategy would produce 5 votes.” (To which one must ask, really? Who’s gonna flip?)

Making the progressive case against Kagan: Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald: “[G]iven that there are so many excellent candidates who have a long, clear commitment to a progressive judicial philosophy, why would Obama possibly select someone who — at best — is a huge question mark?…I believe Kagan’s absolute silence over the past decade on the most intense Constitutional controversies speaks very poorly of her.” This was a follow-up from another piece, where he argued: “Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of ‘post-ideological’ attribute Obama finds so attractive.” Interestingly, this last part seems much the same argument Lessig’s making in her favor, with the valence changed.

(As an aside, this feud got a bit heated, with Greenwald deeming Lessig a liar and stooge. Having been on the wrong end of Greenwald’s wrath myself on the Citizens United case, Lessig’s rebuttal to this charge sounded all-too familiar: “Chill, Glenn. Dial down the outrage. Dial back the hyperbole. And stop calling those who applaud you liars…[Y]ou can make your point well enough without painting everyone else as liars or constitutional crazies.” True story.)

Anyway, speaking of Citizens United, since the President has explicitly said that decision is lousy law several times over, I presume he’s made sure Kagan is in agreement on that front. (He has, right?) And, as I said back during John Roberts’ nomination, my feeling is generally the president’s prerogative in choosing Supreme Court justices should be respected. (Can’t countenance Roberts’ lying, tho’.) So, if Kagan’s the president’s choice, I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and support the nomination.

But, quite frankly, I shouldn’t have to doubt (and here, the next two links are via Greenwald.) As the NYT editorial page well put it: “President Obama may know that his new nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, shares his thinking on the multitude of issues that face the court and the nation, but the public knows nothing of the kind. Whether by ambitious design or by habit of mind, Ms. Kagan has spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.“

So, sure, I guess it’s entirely possible Kagan is a secret superprogressive of the Leonard Cohen type. (“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.“) But there’s another explanation that’s more likely. And, loath as I am to agree with David Brooks, his column today echoes almost exactly what I was thinking:

“Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook.) There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly. She has become a legal scholar without the interest scholars normally have in the contest of ideas. She’s shown relatively little interest in coming up with new theories or influencing public debate. Her publication record is scant and carefully nonideological…What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess.“

That’s my rub too, and it dovetails with larger problems I have with DC political culture. More often than not, the people who tend to succeed here are the ones who keep their head down, play the DC game, stay resolutely non-ideological and unobtrusive in their opinions. never go out on a limb, never say or do anything that could hurt their bid to be a Big (or Bigger) Shot down the road. (Hence, the whole phenomenon of The Village.)The problem is, these plodding, risk-averse careerist types are exactly the type of people you don’t want making decisions in the end, because they will invariably lead to the plodding, risk-averse and too-often rudderless politics of the lowest common denominator.

I’m really hoping the future Justice Kagan isn’t another example of this troubling trend, because as I said when Stevens retired: “The Court needs a strong and unabashed liberal conscience right now. What it emphatically does not need is another centrist technocrat that will help push the Court ever further to the right” But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And when someone spends decades being so careful and circumspect in the face of so many obvious injustices, both by recent administrations and in the world at large…well, I really have to wonder about their judgment.

Update: Having said all that, this recently unearthed 1996 internal campaign finance reform memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, on which Kagan is one of six signers, suggests she is in fact on the right side of the campaign finance reform issue: “It is unfortunately true that almost any meaningful campaign finance reform proposal raises unconstitutional issues and will provoke legal challenge. This is inevitable in light of the Supreme Court’s view — which we believe to be mistaken in many cases — that money is speech and attempts to limit the influence of money on our political system therefore raises First Amendment problems. We think…the Court should reexamine its premise that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment always entails a right to throw money at the political system.” So that’s a big check-mark in my book — Unfortunately, other Clinton-era memos are less promising.

The ACLU’s Achilles Heel…and Glenn Greenwald’s.

“Debate on the question of money and politics has been percolating within the ACLU for years, long before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United. ‘It is difficult to think of an issue that has generated more internal controversy,’ an internal ACLU memo states.“

To its credit and as a result of the Citizens United decision (which the organization has previously lawyered and lobbied for), the ACLU convenes a weekend summit to discuss its campaign finance reform position. “‘The ACLU’s version of democracy is from the ground-up,’ one civil rights lawyer, David Gans, told the ACLU’s board, which was assembled downtown at One New York Plaza. ‘Now Exxon Mobil can spend 2% of its money and blow that all up.’“

Here’s hoping the reformers win the day — or walk out CIO-style if they don’t. Imho, the stance that unlimited corporate funding of our elections is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment has always been the Achilles’ heel of an otherwise superb organization. I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, their reasoning relies on two unfortunate bugs in the legal code — corporate personhood and the conflation of money with speech — that they too often deem fundamental First Amendment principles. I would argue they’re not.

For why the former — corporate personhood — has obvious problems, just read Justice Stevens’ dissent from Thursday:

“The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its ‘identity; as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law….

Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”

For the latter — the ruinous conflation of money and speech in Buckley v. Valeo — check out Stevens’ concurrence in Nixon v. Shrink Government Pact (2000), where he says how he’d come down if Buckley were reopened:

“In response to [Justice Kennedy’s] call for a new beginning, therefore, I make one simple point. Money is property; it is not speech.

Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results…

Telling a grandmother that she may not use her own property to provide shelter to a grandchild — or to hire mercenaries to work in that grandchild’s campaign for public office — raises important constitutional concerns that are unrelated to the First Amendment.”

(See also Byron White’s concurrence in part in Buckley, which argues that “[n]othing in the First Amendment stands in the way of ” campaign finance limits.)

But somewhere along the line and for whatever reason, the ACLU latched on to both of these unwise shibboleths, and have since been arguing that corporate personhood and the idea of money as speech are both enshrined in the First Amendment. Uh…really?

To see what kind of damage these two bogus ideas have wrought, one need only to go over to Salon and read through Glenn Greenwald’s ugly meltdown on Citzens United the past few days. As anyone who visits GitM regularly knows, I link to Greenwald pretty much constantly. On a host of issues, from Obama’s terrible record on civil liberties to the broken-down state of our journalism, he’s been remarkably on point, and one of my favorite columnists to read. I used to wonder if there was anything I disagreed with him on. Well, it turns out, there is. And, apparently, I’m a “partisan hack” for thinking different.

For the Cliff Notes version of this whole conversation, I wrote up a snarky summation of it here yesterday, well after things had gone south. But, basically, Glenn — on “homework assignment” — argued on Friday that, all the negative consequences that will ensue aside, the Majority in Citizen’s United decided the case correctly, that this was a victory for the first amendment, and that people who disagree with their decision are practicing “outcome-based law.” (He also made the dubious and unprovable assertion that things can’t get any worse anyway. Really? We’ll see.)

Well, this assessment did not sit right with a lot of people. Some questioned his reading of the case. Others pointed out that law is always outcome-based, even the Majority’s ruling in Citizens. (The concerned outcome for Justice Kennedy here is that blogs might get banned someday, somehow, if this ruling isn’t made. I’ll take my chances.) And, others, such as myself, questioned these two principles — corporations are people, money is speech — that the ruling was based on.

Well, suffice to say, Greenwald did not take criticism well. He adamantly refused to engage either notion — money isn’t speech, corporations aren’t people — as having any merit whatsoever, eventually trying to write off both with some dubious 1L hypotheticals. (All were answered to his disadvantage, several times over.) He went on to ridicule the folks who disagreed with him in a “check out the Big Brain on me” kinda way. (He argued his lawyerly creds just means he knows better.) He ignored Stevens’ actual dissent throughout. And he accused folks of being just like Dubya on torture for deigning to disagree with him on the decision.

This embarrassing conceit — those with disagree with me are Dubyaites, end of story — formed the extraordinarily condescending introduction of Greenwald’s follow-up to his first post. Still ignoring the legitimate criticisms people were making of the two assertions above — money=speech and corporations=people, Glenn instead pulled one line from Justice Stevens’ ninety pages of dissent to argue that all nine Justices agreed with both of these propositions. (This even though both Ginsburg and Sotomayor questioned the corporate personhood idea in oral arguments, and that Stevens explicitly said he did not agree with the money=speech proposition in Nixon v. Shrink, an argument Glenn would not touch.) As it turns out, the one line Glenn pulled from Stevens’ dissent proved neither assertion. Nonetheless, he returned to his shell, refusing to even consider the notion that “money=speech” or “corporations=people” might be lousy interpretations or legal accidents, or that they aren’t necessarily covered by the First Amendment.

When I shared the above ACLU story this morning, Greenwald blew another gasket:

“The ACLU has a long history of standing up to and defying people [like] you: those who pretend to believe in the Constitution and civil liberties only when it can be used as a weapon to advance your partisan and political agenda.

If they didn’t reverse themselves on the First Amendment rights of Nazis in the wake of huge numbers of people like you (those who only believe in the Constitution when it suits them) cutting off funding and leaving the organization, I highly doubt they will do so now….

But what has made the ACLU such an important and unique organization is that they have stood their ground on principle and resisted the efforts of people like you to turn it into a partisan tool rather than an organization devoted to the Constitution.”

I guess he figured I’d forget what “people like me” means from paragraph to paragraph. And, yes, y’all, I’ve been writing on politics and progressivism here for ten years because I’ve always wanted to subvert the Constitution to my own ends. And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that nasty Greenwald!

Anyway, when I then reminded Greenwald that people of principle can disagree on these issues, and that it may even be possible that the ACLU reformers might even be the right ones in this story, that’s when I got called an Orwellian partisan hack once more. (FWIW, here’s my kissoff. I particularly like “paddock of principle and certitude.”)

Throughout this whole back-and-forth, there was not even the remotest possibility that any other interpretation on these two questions had merit for Greenwald: Corporations have first amendment rights. Money is speech. Both are obviously enshrined in the First Amendment. And arguing anything else is ridiculous and deserving of scorn (even if Supreme Court justices have argued differently in the past, including as recently as Thursday.) So let it be written, so let it be done.

Uh…really? Who knows…perhaps it’s a lawyer thing. Nonetheless, this myopic, bullish way of thinking — I hold the only correct possible interpretation of the law, and you’re either with me or you’re with the Dubyaites — isn’t very satisfying on either personal or argumentative grounds. And Greenwald’s constant doubling down on his original argument, even as more and more holes were poked in it by various responders, makes me question not only his temperament but his writing in general. He usually provides a valuable public service, no doubt, but he seems to have bought into his own hype as an Incorruptible Defender of Liberty. If you can’t think outside of yourself once in awhile, or find some way to weigh arguments you may not necessarily agree with without deeming them unprincipled, you’re really not much use to anyone.

Update: Looks like Greenwald addressed this topic one more time this morning. Here’s what he said:

“‘Money is not speech’ is an idiot bumper sticker slogan, not a meaningful argument which resolves anything. ‘Corporations have no constitutional rights’ is such an extreme and dangerous position (it endorses the constitutionality of the FBI’s searching whatever corporate offices they want and seizing all corporate documents with no search warrants or probable cause, or the Congress’ imposing $10 million fines on corporations every time they criticize the government, among other things) that it’s frivolous in the extreme. Despite that, I spent substantial time all weekend addressing and responding to those frivolous bumper sticker slogans.“

So there you have it. An “idiot bumper sticker slogan”…repeated verbatim by Justice Stevens in 2000. (And, for what it’s worth, Greenwald referred to civil rights lawyer David Kairys’ piece on these two questions, linked several times above, as “stupid and ill-informed.”) Class act, Glenn.

Brownian Motion.

So, slow news evening, eh?

Well, first off, thanks, Massachusetts! To my many friends from the Bay State, I say this: Speaking as a son of South Carolina, I never, ever want to get the “you-hicks-are-keeping-us-back” routine from y’all again, thanks much.

So, yes, Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. And thus, in a truly bitter irony, a man who spent his life trying to achieve health care reform for all Americans has now been replaced by a guy sworn to kill the health care bill and armed with the 41st vote(?) that could potentially make it happen. (Yes, Virginia, it’s true. In our system, 41 > 59.) Well, in Brown’s defense, he has a nice truck.

Why did this happen? Well, everybody has a theory. Here’s mine, which boils down to two reasons.

1. Martha Coakley. I didn’t watch enough of the MA race to determine if she was a lousy candidate through-and-through, although I have my suspicions. Nonetheless, Ms. Coakley was undeniably a gaffe-prone standard-bearer. From calling Curt Schilling a Yankee to misspelling the name of the state in a political ad to, weirdly, insulting the very idea of glad-handing in public, Coakley was an out-and-out gaffe machine. Couple that with a lackadaisical campaign and the inexplicable decision to take an extended vacation in the heat of the race, and you have a recipe for disaster. There’s a reason we’ve been telling the story of the Tortoise and the Hare for a couple thousand years now.

2. Change. In fending off Rahm Emanuel’s charge that she’s at fault for this fiasco, pollster Celinda Lake aptly summed up the main problem here: ““If Scott Brown wins tonight he’ll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it.” Put another way: All across the country, the current occupants of the White House tapped into a deep and strongly-felt yearning for a transformative presidency in 2008…and then spent pretty much the entirety of their first-year in office playing the same old tired in-the-Beltway reindeer games that made people ill in the first place. This is not change voters believed in, and it has made voters angry, or depressed, or both.

Equally demoralizing is the neverending spectacle of a stalled-out health care bill. If I’d hazard a guess, most voters aren’t really delving into the ins and outs of this all-consuming debate, particularly by Month Eight or whatever it is. But they can see just from casually following along that the Democrats are really struggling to get this done, that the White House has been letting the bill get bogged down and eviscerated in the Senate — first in August, and again in November/December — and that, from the Big Pharma deal to the disappearing public option to all of the Lieberman/Stupak/Nelson/Snowe shenanigans on display, the usual Washington rules are in full effect right now. Once again, this is not change people can believe in. With each passing month that the bill has languished, we Dems have looked weaker and weaker. And if you continually force voters to choose between venal and incompetent, they’ll tend to gravitate toward the former.

Now, the good news: 1. First, and this cannot be stressed enough, we have an 18-seat majority in the Senate. It’s 59-41 people…most presidents can only dream of having that kind of majority, Dubya included. So there’s really no good reason — none, zip, zero — that we shouldn’t see more progressive accomplishments from this administration in the year to come. It just takes an act of will. I don’t remember the Republicans getting all kerfuffled about operating with 51 votes. Nor did Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson Senate have any problem with blithely ignoring the Senate parliamentarian when it got in the way of legislation.

2. It’s January of 2010, i.e. almost a full year before the “real” election day. In other words, this Brown victory is really just a shot across the bow. And if the administration course-corrects now, we may even end up gaining a year in time — and several seats we might well have lost — had this lazy centrist drift continued on until next November.

Of course, that’s only good news if the administration and the Democratic Party draw the right lessons from yesterday’s defeat. Suffice to say, this afternoon, it does not look good: Enabled, as usual, by the Serious People™ who comprise the broken-down wreck we once called beltway journalism, all the usual suspects are currently blaming Coakley’s loss on “the Left,” or more specifically the hippie-liberal cast of Obama’s administration thus far. Uh, say what now?

It’s hard to answer this ridiculous charge any better than did the estimable Glenn Greenwald this afternoon: “‘In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by ‘the Left,’ let alone ‘the furthest left elements” of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left ‘ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months’….The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials — and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems — has been captive ‘to the Left’ is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it.“

Truer words and all that. If we want to stop seeing these sorts of Brownian upsets in the future, the answer is emphatically not to curl up within the usual GOP-lite protective camouflage and hope the flak dies down. People see through that malarkey immediately. (As Harry Truman is rumored to have said, “In an election between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican wins every time.“) No, the answer is to move forward from this point with the courage of our convictions, and to start delivering to American families the real and fundamental change they were promised a year ago. It’s just that simple, folks.

The Trouble With Harry.

“Mr. Ford spoke about his childhood in Memphis, describing a grandmother who used the extension cords from living room lamps to discipline him and his brother. ‘I am always amazed when I meet parents who say they can’t get their kids to go to church, ’cause I didn’t know kids had options like that…Later, he returned to the subject: ‘We as a nation need to be disciplined. If there were ever a day in which an electric cord ought to be used on all of us to remind us of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s on the King holiday.'”

Speaking of exactly the direction Dems don’t need to go after yesterday’s’ Massachusetts thumping, consider Harold Ford, who (with some not-insubstantial Wall Street prodding) has up and decided he wants to be the Senator from New York, and who, among his many, many other faults, cannot seem to wrap his mind around either the basic fundamentals of capitalism or Dr. King’s doctrine of non-violence.

As I said on Twitter the other day, Harold Ford may not represent *everything* that’s wrong with the Dems, because we’ve got lots of problems right now. But he’s darn close.

Horror in Haiti.

“Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed.” Haiti reels after a devastating 7.3 earthquake that may well have claimed thousands of lives. What a horrible nightmare…and it kinda puts the past week of idiotic Beltway yammering about Harry Reid’s vernacular and the Edwards’ bad behavior in perspective, doesn’t it? Real news please. [How to help.][How not to help.]

The Myth of 11-Dimensional Chess.

“Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional ‘centrists.’ Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.“

A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan’s non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration’s back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)

I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now’s as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it’s hard to think of any arena where this administration’s first year hasn’t been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn’t mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president’s war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)

Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: “There’s a possibility — maybe even a strong possibility — that he’ll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him.” Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y’all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he’s actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we’d spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us — We’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.

Dubya By Any Other Name.

“Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept — and had even okayed — just weeks earlier.” TIME’s Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf examine the recent ousting of Greg Craig, a slow death by leaking, as a telling indicator of how the Obama administration has fallen so far astray on civil liberties. “[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by [Rahm] Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.” Uh, what? As Nick Baumann points out in Mother Jones, what business do the politicos have in overseeing legal matters? That’s rather Rovian, isn’t it?

On target as usual, Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald puts this Craig story and the KSM trial into broader perspective: “As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration. And it’s flatly inconsistent to invoke ‘the rule of law’ to defend Obama’s decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he’s violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.” (Pic via the MJ article linked above.)

Backing into a Quagmire.

“I will tell you the more I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing, the more I think of it, I don’t know what in the hell it looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea […] I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw.” Also via Greenwald today and in light of Obama’s upcoming decision on Afghanistan, former LBJ aide Bill Moyers painstakingly pieces together how his old boss made the decision to escalate in Vietnam. “We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.“

A Republic Needs No Subjects.

“The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.” In an editorial applauded by Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald, the NYT calls out the Obama administration for their appalling and Dubyaesque record on civil liberties.

As Greenwald well notes: “All of this vividly underscores a vital point. There is simply no way that a person with even the most minimal levels of intellectual integrity could have objected to these actions during the Bush years yet defend them now that Obama is doing them, or even refrain from objecting just as loudly.“

See also Sen. Feingold’s recent and angry post on dKos this month (coupled with this statement on the Senate Judiciary committee) on the hamstringing of his attempts to revise the Patriot Act. Far too many ostensible civil libertarians in the Democratic Party have been rolling over for this administration since January — The time for giving the benefit of the doubt has passed. On this — and other crucial issues before us — it’s time to put this admin’s feet to the fire and hold the president to his word.