L'État, c'est moi

Republicans aren’t traditionally inclined to argue for lesser punishments due the offender by virtue of youth, but they are quite content to invoke that shibboleth of “youthful indiscretion” when discounting the actions of one of their own. Young Bush is received into the fold as a prodigal son and yet some kid who did what he did might never have the right to vote in Florida again.

Never mind what he said back then, Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee was a young man when he wrote a memorandum in 1984 saying that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits for ordering wiretaps of Americans without permission from a court. He was a young man, so don’t worry that he might just be a closet fascist or that his appointment is insurance for the Bush administration against prosecution for cutting a swath through the constitution.

The memo argued that top officials should not be subject to liability for damages for decisions relating to national security, even when they knowingly violated the law. But he counseled against appealing the issue to the Supreme Court "Because we now must argue that the official should be immune from violating clearly established legal standards," there is a "high risk of failure." That risk may be significantly smaller with a Court stuffed full of Bushiviks.

He also argued that the 1978 FISA law creating the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, which considers and issues warrants for gathering intelligence in the United States "clarified the procedure in this area and probably reduced in large measure the potential for future litigation." That might have been the case had Bush elected to inform that court of his massive data mining enterprise. Perhaps Bush had good reason not to, as today’s New York Times alleges that Bush’s wiretapping is vastly larger than we have been informed of.

“As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications. . .

Alito suggested that his superiors wait until the heat over Nixon’s violations died down before pursuing legislation that would enable an administration to violate the law with impunity. He was a young man.

George W Bush is not a young man. He is a man who wants the power to act outside the law in the name of national security and he wants to be the man who tells us when that is necessary and he wants to be the man to decide whether we can know about it. How much longer can we survive George Bush’s freedom?