6. The order. In the Post's telling, Cheney and his team pretty much single-handedly came up with the plan to send detainees to military tribunals rather than civilian courts; they shortcircuited a panel that was supposed to be considering the issue, rejected the complaints of Attorney General John Ashcroft, and kept their plan secret from Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. After ordering that the plan be kept out of any staff review, Cheney got Bush to sign it by hand-walking it to him at lunch in the private dining room near the Oval Office.

Here's the core problem. Bush was willing to bypass his own appointees to placate Cheney, and on such a radical idea as 21st-century star chambers. In short, Cheney owns Bush, in the way a pitcher with a knack for striking out Ken Griffey Jr. is said to "own" Griffey. The corollary problem is that said appointees, particularly Bush's confidante Rice, let it happen instead of raising holy hell.

Before we get all mushy about how the WaPo's scrutiny of Cheney might mean that Graham fils finally sees the light, we should ask ourselves: what is the Post trying to distract our attention from? Iraq? Scooter's sentencing? I don't know, but it's time to be vigilant.

In law, there's a rule known as "judicial estoppel," essentially meaning that if you win a case with the legal theory "A > B" you can't then turn around and try to win the next case by arguing "A < B." If "A > B" loses, then you're free to switch to "A < B," because that's what the court ruled. But if "A > B" wins, you're stuck.

So, by winning with an argument that he's in the Executive Branch, Cheney will find it difficult even to be permitted to advance the argument that he isn't a member of the Executive Branch. Unless the fix is in again, of course.

Now is the time for Candidates Clinton, Obama and Edwards ought to serve their country with explicit declarations about how they will treat Congressional subpoenas (etc.) if elected President.

Glenn --

Do you mean "camp" in the late-60s sense of transparent, cheap, short-term faddish, or an honest-to-goodness Army camp?

I think the former is more apt.

Did Mr. Bush mock Libby, perhaps by mimicry of his terrified pleas for clemency, as he considered his decision?

I wish all bloggers, great and small, would learn and apply the shades of meaning among "prove," "support, and "corroborate," on one side, and "disprove," "refute," and "rebut" on the other. The Pew polls don't "disprove" anything. As lawyers like to say, you can't prove a negative. Shame on you, Glenn. As a lawyer, you should be more respectful of "proof."

The polls do rebut certain notions, and provide useful and interesting information. Period.

The problem isn't only that I'm a language crank, although that is true, too. It's that this kind of solecism is another baby step down the propagandist path of the neocons and all the other cons down through the centuries. I starts with a transparent exaggeration ("I must have read a thousand stupid Freeper posts last night."), proceeds to a thoughtless white lie (such as trumpeting the lowest recent approval number (currently 28%) as if it were the average or consensus of many polls), and drifts to occasional, then habitual, torture of verbs like "disprove" in ways that bolster the point one is trying to make. In the distant limit, we reach the complete disconnect between words and concepts as practiced by Bush, Limbaugh, and such fiends.

We have the moral high ground in such matters. Let's don't squander it.

Sorry, as I edit my prose it gets purpler and purpler until the main point disappears into the background.

Poll results, even ones we like, don't "prove" or "disprove" anything except possibly the narrow hypothesis "is this result significantly different from 50%?" It's no more legitimate to say "these poll results prove my point" than it is to for an ID theorist to say, "evolution has never been proved." In both cases, you're misusing the overtones of the concept "proof" to include a level of certainty that mere data can never legitimately imply.

Let me try another example. Bloggers love to interpret Bush's low approval polls as proof that people hate Bush, or that they clearly wish Bush would do A, B, or C or stop doing X, Y or Z. This is wishful thinking on the bloggers' part, and that's what I'm cautioning against. In fact, with regard to Bush's swoon in the approval polls, as Professor Pollkatz I've argued for years that they are highly influenced by quality-of-economic-life factors, as summarized by gasoline prices. Until a few months ago, approval and gasoline prices went up and down in lock step. I could be wrong, but even if I am, the most plausible alternative is that approval and gasoline prices are both rising and falling with some deeper, unmeasured variable.

Surely gasoline prices do not rise and fall based on how much people hate Bush. That's the point. Whatever is going on with approval poll results, it apparently has almost nothing directly to do with anything Bush is doing or not doing. (Bush's policies are another matter: if people think that his saber-rattling in Iran is spooking the oil markets, then they'll infer a direct causal link between Bush and gasoline. But I don't think that most people are thinking so subtly.)

When someone, especially someone of as high a profile as Glenn Greenwald, writes that polls prove his point, he is not only being sloppy, which seems to be endemic among all bloggers, but ominously (to my mind) misinterpreting a concept so as to make his point seem stronger than it is. That's my real beef. As a litigator, Glenn wouldn't have said that, because he'd be aware that his opponent's reply brief would mock him for the error. As a blogger, without that countervailing force, he can and seems to be inching down a slippery slope of exaggeration and rhetoric.