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.

Fox News Airs “Magic Negro” Message On New Year’s Broadcast.

(HT: Tom, who RSVP’d for NYE but never actually showed up.)

Giant swinging dick and all-around smart guy Zbigniew Brzezinski lays the smackdown on Joe Scarborough on his own show during a discussion of the Gaza conflict in the larger context of mideast relations in the last 20 or so years. Among other things, Z pointed out that under Clinton, we had a policy of engagement and discussion for both sides of the issue, and kept Israel and Arafat at the table — which cut down on violence. Until 1/01, when Clinton left office and Bush more or less abandoned that approach. Anyway, Joe said something stupid, to which ZB replied “You know, you have such a stunning superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” HuffPo has video. Don’t miss it.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that “for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

WTF, Gonzo? This blogger sums it up:

This is pretty much the most clueless statement I can imagine. The treatment Gonzales received concerned the program of politicizing the department he was in charge of, the Department of Justice. It came after a string of answers which showed Gonzales either didn’t know at all what was happening in his own DOJ, or was purposely misleading Senators with a string of “I do not recall” answers. Gonzales now doesn’t just fail to recall, he fails to understand the enormity of his incometencies. Look for no responsibility taken in this book.

Worse here is that Gonzales compares himself to the real victims in the War on Terror, the men and women who died on 9/11, the soldiers who died because of Bush’s policies, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. . . those are victims of the “War on Terror.” Mr. Gonzales is at worst complicit in some of those deaths in that he helped justify some ugly policies. At best, Gonzales is merely a bumbling incompetent.

More on the interview over at TPM; the TPM excerpt includes this heartwarming quote:

The Harvard Law School graduate, onetime corporate lawyer and Texas judge also hasn’t been able to land a job. He has delivered a few paid speeches, done some mediation work and plans to do some arbitration, but said law firms have been “skittish” about hiring him.

Some small justice, I suppose.