Which is it. Uncontained arrogance or checking the law? (leak)

[peacetalksforall]

Corporate propaganda networks are implying that the minions didn't get orders, they just received direction and acted on their own.

I say, no one does what they did, without checking their legal status and risk. Whether a legal check was directed by Bush and/or Cheney or not - Libby, Rove, Fleischer, Hadley or anyone else should have covered themselves.

If no law was checked - then we're left with unmitigated arrogance.

So we are left with Meirs and Gonzales and the extensive staff - including the lawyer who accompanied George to the Fitzgerald 'interview'.

It's in their hands.

[saltpoint]

1. Don't have clinical evidence, but the little elves tell me that

this is the guiltiest bunch of lying thugs who ever got up and walked.

Only part of that response is owed to partisan loyalties. The rest has to do with the furtive debasement of the Constitution rendered almost daily by the Bush administration.

[peacetalksforall]

2. I wonder if Toensing or DeGenova were called? Or how about

Theodore, Meese, Baker?

Or maybe it was a team of student lawyers from Falwells U.

Or maybe there were no lawyers.

[saltpoint]

4. I'm reading in Sy Hersh's excellent piece in the current NEW YORKER

that James Baker has been shunned from Junior's circle, that Junior regards Jim Baker as an old fuddy-duddy, a dried-up prune from Poppy's old group.

And this despite Baker's skullduggery in fixing the post-election court battle in Florida to essentially give Dubya the presidency. Dubya would not have won that legal entanglement had it not been for Jim Baker. Baker is the ultimate fixer. Gore's people were earnest but they were generally too decent to play down and dirty like Baker.

I'm becoming more and more aware of how disconnected this president is. Again, some of that is partisan prejudice, but not all of it.

Antidepressants? Booze? An unraveling psyche? It's not looking real good for the next couple of years.

[peacetalksforall]

5. I keep thinking that he is a living game and psy-op experiment.

I believe they chose him because they knew from study that he would go over with the believe-anythings. They needed a voting base to make most of the election legal and to keep the calls coming on the Washington Journal and the support kicked up by Lucianne and Rush, and Fox, etc.

I think he probably didn't want to do it so they promised him things - x number of trips to Crawford in exchange for x number of fund raisers and x number of hours at exercise, including video games. Who knows what they promised him for the trips to furrener countries, probably so many dollars a minute. Then they went about creating a world where they built up his confidence and belief in himself and taught him to use the mike while they still protected him from dissentors.

I feel they walk a very precipitous cliff. At the same time they have succeeded, I think they also had a chemical balance problem in addition to the psychological.

I think he was willing to let Cheney be the strategist. I think he has now started asserting himself. In the end, it is all a problem about illusions. And it is getting scary in some way I can't explain to myself. He seems to think that he now knows how to do it and since Cheney hasn't been doing so well, he'll have to do it because he can do it. A dangerous Smalley.

In other words, I think he is greatly dependent.

I am obnoxious to presume, but he is fodder for analyzing and questioning as he is not our ordinary Hollywood film President.

[peacetalksforall]

3. Well said Old Crusoe. n/t