that when there was enough evidence for his arrest he was "persuaded" by government and Bush officials that suicide would be better all around -- for his family, for the country he loved, and for George W. Bush -- than his arrest and trial.

I think this sort of thing was once fairly common among the officers of European armies. Rather than let a scandal bring the officer corps into disrepute, an officer the offender couldn't ignore would place a pistol on the man's desk and then wait in the hall.

Keeps all the scandalous information nice and hidden.

is why the Democratic contender (or President) can't put the fear of God into the White House Press Corpse: "If your network doesn't start reporting the campaign fairly, and if I win anyway, it'll be a cold day in Hades before you or anybody else they send will get access beyond an intern with his desk in the suburbs." The players all know the ways to say this without actually saying the words.

-- in 1894. Look at the law from the perspective of the Bad Man, he wrote. A man who wants to get away with as much as he can. His only concern with the statutes as written is the likelihood that they will be applied in his case. Suddenly, it becomes clear that the only meaningful notion of law is the connection (or not) between behavior and punishment.

The top of the Republican hierarchy, populated almost entirely by Bad Men (with a few Bad Women) understands Holmes perfectly.

Relatedly, several comments are pointing out that House members only voted against the bailout out of fear of losing the upcoming election, not because of any "sincere" concern for what their constituents think. That's a distinction without a difference. When elected officials take action out of fear of provoking the anger of voters, that is the democratic process in action. To say that the bailout failed (in part) because of public opinion isn't to ascribe noble sentiments to members of Congress -- it's only to say that they were driven to do what they did by public opinion.

I disagree, Glenn. There's a lot of daylight between heeding public opinion and heeding it for fear of losing an election. I haven't noticed them heeding public opinion on Iraq, FISA, net neutrality, Supreme Court nominees, the unitary executive. . .

It's the distinction between doing something because it's the right thing to do and doing something because someone's holding a gun to your head. And that is a very big difference.

If they can suppress make-believe S&M films there will be a bigger market for the Army's and CIA's true-life S&M films. Hey, anything to take a chunk out of the deficit.

Joking aside -- who was humiliated? Surely not the actors, who were no more humiliated than they were injured.

The more they unmask themselves this way, the more smashing will be their defeat, the longer their banishment will be.

To paraphrase Lee Atwater, "as long as the enemy is self-destructing, don't interrupt."

The 1932 election was contested between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Hoover. If anything, some of FDR's proposals leaned farther right and farther away from good policy than did Hoover's.

Five months later came the Bank Holiday and the Hundred Days.

Roosevelt and Obama understand that during an election campaign, ideological purity must sit in the back seat (if not the trunk) to make room for pure hardball pragmatism. Obama's sitting pretty -- the best McCain can do is Bill Ayres. He has no policy hook to get people's attention. Why hand him one by returning Georgia to everyone's mind? After the inauguration, President Obama will be totally free to deal realistically with Georgia without reneging on his denouncement of Russia.

Let 'em have the side issues. Win on the main issues. I'm surprised that the trial lawyer in you doesn't have a deep gut level understanding of this sort of litigation tactic.

Or is it strategy?

Who cares how many nights John and Cindy have spent together over the past couple of decades, or how affectionate they are with one another when sitting at home, or that -- 15 years ago -- she "was caught stealing drugs from her nonprofit organization to feed her addiction to painkillers," or whether her 2004 separation from McCain was due (as she claimed) to a stroke, or whether their marriage is a union of convenience and business rather than true love, or whether she actually crossed into Rwanda from Zaire during a 1994 trip to help refugees, or how often his friends in DC interact with her socially? How is there a public interest in knowing any of that?

-- too detailed? If you (we) are really above all that gossip, why reproduce it?

After all, since they're OK with having a 14-year old girl join a harem, why not 7-year olds singing about sexuality?

I cherish a memory of a moment in a campus debate about "The Last Temptation of Christ." The fundies' gladiator -- a nice guy, by the way, if you could overlook his fetish -- got angry about the mocking interruptions by the liberals' guy.

Fundie: "You're censoring me!!"

Liberal: "I'm not censoring you. I'm insulting you!!"

contemplating his hubris, his failure and his ultimate humiliation, on every one of those long, solitary, days, and just possibly repenting and begging forgiveness for the evil he has done.

He's played a religious man on TV all these years -- it might well behoove him to become one.