“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” — Sinclair Lewis

We are now a nation who openly assert that the government has the right to arrest and detain without charge any person, citizen or not, interesting to the President with no counsel, no recourse, and with no protections from inhumane treatment.

The Bush administration’s May, 2002 lawless detention of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla — on U.S. soil — was, as I recounted in my book, the first incident which really prompted me to begin concluding that things were going terribly awry in our country. The administration declared Padilla an “enemy combatant,” put him in a military prison, and refused to charge him with any crime or even allow him access to a lawyer or anyone else. He stayed in a black hole, kept by his own government, for the next three-a-half-years with no charges of any kind ever asserted against him and with the administration insisting on the right to detain him (and any other American citizen) indefinitely — all based solely on the secret, unchallengeable say-so of the President that he was an “enemy combatant.”

Back in July, Bush tried to smack down a CNN reporter in a press conference who asserted North Korea’s nuclear program was expanding. Keep smirking, Mr. President. Keep smirking.

So, the DPRK may or may not have a real, functional nuke now. Many analysts are now saying that the perceived yield of yesterday’s explosion is far below that which Pyongyang was widely believed to be capable, strongly suggesting a failed test rather than a successful nuclear debut. That hardly matters, though, as their contempt for the international community on this point is now a matter of no dispute.

How’d this happen? It’s pretty obvious that Bush’s “get tough with the Axis of Evil” approach had more than a little to do with Kim Jong Il’s bellicosity since 2000. See Josh Marshall’s analysis:

North Korea’s nuclear program has been a problem for US presidents going back to Reagan, and the conflict between North and South has been a key issue for US presidents going back to Truman. As recently as 1994, the US came far closer to war with North Korea than most Americans realize.

President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear reactors (the kind that don’t help making bombs) and a vague promise of diplomatic normalization.

President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.

Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.

All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush’s idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton’s mix of carrots and sticks.

Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush’s bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren’t so grave and vast.

Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.

Of course, Marshall is no fan of the President, so some of you may not find this all that convincing. However, Marshall is by no means alone, and even some Republicans view this development as a significant Bush failure.

From TalkingPointMemo, this excerpt from AP:

President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

Basically, this means he gets to decide whether to report on DHS’s law-abiding or -breaking behavior. Or so he asserts in his extraconstitutional signing statement. More via Yahoo.

Fox News tried to help their GOP masters yesterday by repeatedly identifying Foley as a Democrat.

They use children as human shields to prevent reporters from asking awkward Foley questions.

So, Woodward’s new book says Tenet warned Condi about scary intel from AQ in the summer of 2001.

Condi, predictably, insisted this was horseshit.

Too bad White House records make her a liar.

Is there anything these people won’t lie about?

Well done, Cliff Schecter. Some GOP talking head tried to spin the Foley situation as an isolated incident when compared to the Democrats’ corruption problems, which is just the wrong angle, and gets a serious smackdown for her trouble.

We can’t imagine what she was thinking. The whole trope of “the Dems are just as bad!” just won’t hunt when the GOP is losing seats to indictments and jail terms, with more likely to come as the Abramoff and Foley coverup investigations expand.

TPM reports that it turns out Bush has been learning the lessons of Vietnam. He’s just been learning them from Henry “Let’s Bomb Cambodia” Kissinger, a man who thinks the main problem with our Southeast Asian adventurism was that we didn’t stay long enough.

Sweet Lord.