All this angst over whether one should question one's assumptions (some well-turned phrases in these past dozen pages), but don't forget the one I presume Jonah Goldberg keeps framed on a wall somewhere:

"I once thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken."

About as appropriate as Liddy's "When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."

The fact that being a Fringe Leftist Loser means you're wrong even when you're right is only fair and an unobjectionable premise, since there's a whole passel of Neocon Idiots who are deemed right even when they're wrong, right? How else does one explain William Kristol's continued pontifications and Serious People listening to them?

Mr. Davis is on TV all the time because he has honed his particular lawyer skills and he talks real goodly so people believe him. And people with money who want to convince people they're right search out and hire people who can talk goodly and look like Father Knows Best on TV.

The high priced hookers get to be high priced because they do what they do really well. So with the Lanny Davises of the world.

And the fault, the risk, the evil of the Lanny Davis Goodly Talking Syndrome is that people don't know who's telling him what to say and so people repair to a mythical presumption he's talking goodly about something that he thought up with that same goodliness that lets him talk so smooth and nice-like, and so he must really believe it himself and it must be a good thought.

It is all about disclosure. And Jim White has the most exhilaratingly clear suggestion I've ever heard on this. You can legislate administrative filing obligations until the cows come home, but if Lanny Davis wore a "Sponsored by Whole Foods" sign around his neck, who would credit -- hell, what network would air -- an interview in which he shilled this kind of "goodly-said observations"?

The Bush administration illegally tortured, and did so by having mid-level synchophant lawyers construct (in secret) some legal-sounding memos justifying what the Bush administration wanted to do. They treated these memos as if they had been enacted by Congress and had withstood challenge before the courts -- except, well, they were secret and not even those engaging in the acts of torture saw them.

So, now, caught (I'd say "busted", but that's a term that connotes law enforcement involvement, which is clearly premature to predict). What to do, what to do. We have obvious instances of illegal conduct, a couple of years worth of discrete instances of illegal conduct, more than one but less than all actions in apparently direct contravention of existing US and international law. What to do, what to do.

Holder's reported "plan" does this: normalize lawbreaking. Take the existence of planned and choreographed incidents of flagrantly illegal conduct, and transform those planned and choreographed instances of illegality into the recognized norm and standard for America. And those who might have deviated from that norm, well, prosecute them maybe.

Does this reflect a failure to understand that there is, in fact, a difference between "criminalizing policy" and "policy that is criminal"? There really is a difference between the two. When the Bush administration decided to secretly jettison existing statutory, treaty and international obligations, that may well have been a "policy decision", but it would no less be a "policy decision" to engage is a program to secretly take all the gold in the Fed and ship it to the Cayman Islands to an account in Cheney's name -- saying it's "policy" doesn't make it legal, that's an open question until the Congress or the courts weigh in.

Holder must investigate, and likely would determine he must prosecute, not only the minions who may or may not have even seen the basis for their orders, but -- even more importantly -- those who set out to create and implement a "criminal policy" of torture which has debased America more shamefully than any policy in our history.

Some, certainly too many, instances of illegal torture were authorized by the Bush administration. There is no excuse for normalizing torture. Deal with those instances, with all of those instances and with all of those who caused them, but don't tell America that's who and what we are and shall be going forward.

Ask Olbermann, he'll confirm the truth of that though he didn't actually agree to be a party to the order, and Hillary doesn't feel that good about it, either. But there must be somebody making somebody say stuff this pathetically and diametrically contrary to the official conduct of the United States Government relative to identical lawlessness by US officials, so it just has to be GE, because not even Limbaugh has this much power.

... but the most fitting characterization of his explanation is "I resent your accusation, Sir. I don't deny it, I just resent it." He's not the first, he won't be the last. I'm more interested in how his superiors handle the fallout, and here's hoping Glenn can nail them. After all, which would KO rather have been able to say: "Ya got us" or "It's not that you're wrong, it's that my butt will be in a sling if I agree with you."

Pulling this kind of crap is bad enough. Forcing your employees to take this kind of blame for it is certainly worthy of its own scrutiny.