I agree -- as vile as Yoo is, we must not allow ourselves to be distracted.

President Bush has now publicly acknowledged his own role in the approval of an official policy of state torture:

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

...Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz, ..."yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4635175&page=1

My understanding and commentary have followed a depressing arc over the almost four years I have been at this. First, I blamed the Bush Administration for its endless and unprecedented wrongdoing. Then I blamed the media for its bias and failure to report that wrongdoing. But more recently I have been forced to confront the fact that the truth has gradually come out, and is now available to all who would but seek it, but that our citizenry no longer cares.

With this ABC story, it seems to me that this journey is complete. The President of the United States has freely acknowledged complicity in war crimes. The press has reported that searing, unfathomable truth. It is now up to the opiated masses.

Again: the President of the United States has not merely admitted that his underlings have broken the law, and crossed moral lines universally thought inviolate only a decade ago; the President of the United States has just admitted his own participation in and approval of those transgressions. I submit that further reporting about his malfeasance is now superfluous -- what could possibly top that?

If George Bush is not impeached now, then he is right about what America truly is. If Rice and Rumsfeld and Tenet and the rest are not indicted, then the American people thereby are -- indicted for their complicity and acquiescence in the brutality done in their -- in my -- name.

Yoo should be punished. But we must not stop there, or the blood on Bush's hands will, perforce, be on ours, too.

George Stephanopoulos defends his role in the craptacular debate thusly:

“The questions we asked were tough and fair and appropriate and relevant and what you would expect to be asked in a presidential debate at this point,” he said. “The questions we asked…are being debated around the political world every day.”

I couldn't have said it better myself. He unabashedly admits that the reason for wallowing in stupid right-wing talking points is that all the other kewl kidz are wallowing in stupid right-wing talking points. And, of course, we would be naive to expect him to rise above such turd-licking.

Did you pay there guys to do this now to stimulate sales of your book, Glenn?

I finally get it.

Thinking about the juvenile viewpoint of our blighted media, and the way they are extrapolating incompetence from a bowling score just brought me back to a poignant childhood memory that explains it all perfectly.

My parents divorced when I was about 6. A few years later, during one of my father's visits, I persuaded him to take me bowling. I now realize it is quite possible he had never been bowling before, but the fact is he sucked. My disappointment, and perhaps even sense of shame, are vivid decades later. He's been dead more than a decade, but I can still see him throwing gutterballs even now.

When we are young, we want to think our fathers are omnipotent. When they fall short of those magical projections, our most fundamental illusions may painfully shatter. Dad was a lousy bowler, and this eight-year-old felt wounded by that fact.

Does any of that sound familiar? Perhaps if our media stars had matured past the level of an eight year old, our national discourse would not be stupid.

There is a simple but unacknowledged fact behind Hiatt's nonsense: air superiority is of consequence only for the combatant that fails to achieve ground superiority.

Thus there are few more obvious indications of failure in Iraq than the ongoing perceived need in Iraq for the U.S. to bomb from on high.

So of course Dead End Fred wants to mobilize a few hundred brigades per crusade. Even he understands that winning somewhere -- anywhere -- will require ratcheting up the size of the force a bit.

And perhaps he is right -- another three or four hundred thousand troops, billeted in Iraq for another decade or so, and we just might establish sufficient ground superiority to finally eliminate the need to drop bombs on hospitals.

Good show.

Perhaps I tend toward this source of analogies too often, but this absurdly staged tour of Gitmo immediately reminded me of this:

On June 23, 1944, the Nazis permitted the visit by the Red Cross in order to dispel rumors about the extermination camps. The commission included E. Juel-Henningsen, the head physician at the Danish Ministry of Health, and Franz Hvass, the top civil servant at the Danish Foreign Ministry. Dr. Paul Eppstein was instructed by the SS to appear in the role of the mayor of Theresienstadt.

To minimize the appearance of overcrowding in Theresienstadt, the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz. Also deported in these actions were most of the Czechoslovakian workers assigned to 'Operation Embellishment.' They also erected fake shops and cafés to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. The Danes whom the Red Cross visited lived in freshly painted rooms, not more than three in a room. The guests enjoyed the performance of a children's opera, Brundibar, which was written by inmate Hans Krása.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_concentration_camp

On the other hand, the analogy is less than perfect. The 1944 Red Cross could perhaps be seen as innocent of the crimes their reporting failed to uncover.