NYT:

Dennis C. Blair, the retired admiral who is President Obama’s choice as the nation’s top intelligence official, pledged in testimony to be delivered on Thursday that he would require counterterrorism programs to operate “in a manner consistent with our nation’s values, consistent with our Constitution and consistent with the rule of law.”

and more:

“I do not and will not support any surveillance activities that circumvent established processes for their lawful authorization,” he said in the testimony. “I believe in the importance of independent monitoring, including by Congress, to prevent abuses and protect civil liberties.”

In an unusual comment from a man who will head the most secret agencies of government, he said, “There is a need for transparency and accountability in a mission where most work necessarily remains hidden from public view.” He said that if confirmed, he would “communicate frequently and candidly with the oversight committees, and as much as possible with the American people.”

Imagine hearing that — or even the words “rule of law” — from a Bush appointee.

You heard right. Chief Justice Roberts bungled the oath.

Granted, this doesn’t actually matter; no oath is required; from Wikipedia:

Article 2 of the the United States Constitution states that the President must take the oath before he enter office. This was superseded by the 20th Amendment[5] which states that the terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January and the terms of their successors shall then begin. This would therefore allow the President to assume the duties of the office without requiring the oath to be administered.

Keep this in mind in the inevitable right-wing chatter about how Obama isn’t “really” the President.

He says the media shouldn’t be allowed to do reporting on wars. And PJTV is paying him to do exactly that.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

The Economist on Bush includes some fantastic lines, including this:

Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.

Apparently, it “aggravated” Cheney that the NYT won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the illegal, warrantless wiretapping his administration pursued.

What a malignant weasel. Once again, Dick, don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. I have little hope he’ll ever be tried for his crimes, but it IS nice to consider how many nations are essentially closed to him — i.e., that he’ll have to avoid to keep from being arrested.

Remember how the Obamas asked if they could move into Blair House early, so that their children could start school in January with minimal turmoil? And remember how the Bush White House said “nope, already booked?”

Yeah, turns out it wasn’t. The supposed booking — for one night, for right-wing darling John Howard, PM of New Zealand Australia (thanks, I.K.; mea culpa) — hadn’t happened yet. And Blair House? 119 rooms, 35 bathrooms. As the linked story points out, that’s more than enough room for a family of four plus a visiting dignitary for a single night. Hell, for a single night, it’s not at all clear why Howard couldn’t stay in the White House itself.

Classy to the end, these guys. Don’t let the doors hit you on the ass on the way out.

As head of the Office of Legal Counsel — the Executive unit that Bush used to spread the notion of the imperial executive — Obama has picked Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana U. law prof who has been publically assailing “Bush’s corrpution of American ideals” for years:

Upon the release last spring of a secret Office of Legal Counsel memo that permitted the aggressive interrogations of terrorism suspects, she excoriated the unit’s lawyers for advising Bush “that in fighting the war on terror, he is not bound by the laws Congress has enacted.”

“One of the refreshing things about Dawn Johnsen’s appointment is that she’s almost a 180-degree shift from John Yoo and David Addington and (Vice President) Dick Cheney ,” Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe said, referring to the main legal architects of the administration’s approval of harsh interrogation tactics.

John Bolton and John Yoo are in the Times today insisting on what amounts to rollbacks of Executive power.

They begin, again, without ANY note of irony whatsoever:

THE Constitution’s Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments. The clause will likely be tested by Barack Obama’s administration, as the new president and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, led by the legal academics in whose circles they have long traveled, contemplate binding down American power and interests in a dense web of treaties and international bureaucracies.

It’s much, much bigger than Bush, or Bush’s policies. Krugman nails it:

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

He concludes:

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.