Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Weaseling Out of Things


With the new year and the change of administration in Washington there has been a tendency lately for retrospective looks at the outgoing Bush administration which has reminded us of all that has gone wrong in the last eight years and all that the Bush administration and its collaborators have to answer for. This tendency has in turn provoked the apologists for the Bush regime who are now using the unitary executive theory as a shield rather than a spear. The result is conversations like the one on the Diane Rehm show this morning where lawyers acting as apologists for the nefarious acts of Bush policy sound like panicky weasels trying to slip out of anyone having to take responsibility for the wrongs they have done. These pundits try to appear to be centrists, but the way they use arguments regarding pragmatic politics to evade moral accusations that there has been wrongdoing on the part of the Bush administration paints these men as the worst caricature of the sleazy lawyer.

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