that Slaughter does not remember the past, as per Santayana, but that she insists that it has no relevance to the present or future.

In her world, it's not so much that we are supposed to forget what has happened with regard to Iraq, because there are no lessons to be learned, at least not ones that are applicable. Her position is effectively the same as that of the Bush aide who famously denigrated the reality-based community in Ron Suskind's NYT Magazine article.

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Each new action means that whatever happened in the past is immaterial, and Slaughter seems to have taken that flawed logic to heart.

to me here is that the Attorney General of the United States (nominally the top law-enforcement official in the nation) and a former federal judge would so blatantly advocate that things would have been far better for this country if only our government had had less respect for law. Think about it: Mukasey is essentially saying that laws manage to get in the way of acting "correctly", and that this is a problem. If this isn't exactly an endorsement of subjective lawbreaking, it certainly seems to imply that taking the law into one's own hands (a/k/a vigilante-ism) is perfectly acceptable because the ends justify the means. This is shocking, coming from the mouth of the Attorney General.

Of course, only slightly less appalling is that AG Mukasey has such a fundamental misunderstanding of what the laws currently on the books already provide for. That, or his willful attempts to mislead the American people as to what those laws hold. Take your pick -- it's unflattering either way.

Reason number 4358 as to why it will probably take the better part of a generation (if ever) to restore our faith in the impartial administration of justice in this country.

plenty of head scratching among the Congressional leadership as to why the approval ratings for Congress are on a par with those for President Bush. Perhaps someone ought to clue them in that in 2002 and 2004, when the Democratic leadership tried to portray their caucus as GOP-lite, the Republicans held their ground and even scratched out some gains. In 2006, campaigning on clear -- and widening -- differences between the parties led to decisive victories. Now, in 2008, it seems as though finally achieving power has led the party to go beyond merely playing it safe, once again regressing to this concessionary strategy that helped no candidates and significantly diluted the party's brand.

Sounds like an overhaul of the leadership ranks is more than called for.

today's New York Times has on its front page, "G.O.P. Support May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/world/asia/03policy.html

Indeed, while as a candidate Obama didn't speak specifically about bringing the war in Afghanistan to a fairly quick close, he most certainly didn't speak of it as a war without end, since it's increasingly beginning to appear that the best we could hope for is merely "something better than a stalemate". More likely, we're going to come to a point where, like every foreign power that's preceded us, we end up limping home from Afghanistan trying to portray it as not quite a defeat.

You'd think that our political and military leaders had perhaps learned some of the lessons from the latter years of the Soviet occupation, but, sadly, it seems that those lessons have been misunderstood and we may ultimately suffer a similar fate.