Meaningful, high-level prosecutions would be a more remarkable achievement even than the election of Obama. But I am still deeply skeptical that there are enough people in Washington with both the power to make accountability happen and hands not permanently stained in blood to fill a phone booth, let alone definitively repudiate the last eight years of horrors.

Maybe we need to focus the reluctant on the stakes: comparisons to Nazi Germany are rarely helpful, but isn't this our collective guilt roughly comparable (in terms of indelible staining) to Turkey's Armenian genocide? The Turks stonewall even today, ensuring that the taint remains, almost 100 years later. And as Matthews and Hitchens did with Smerconish (and you more forcefully did with Douthat) we can easily dismantle the standard "American exceptionalism" nonsense by focusing on the fate of our own captured troops. Americans WILL suffer for our unexpiated sins.

In short, liberals have, since at least the Vietnam War, been focused on the distance between American self-image and reality -- a difference conservatives have generally denied. Now, perhaps, the Bush war crimes have increased that difference until only a few remain who can deny the resultant chasm.

It may well be, as some suggest here, that Bush will go on a pardoning binge on his way out. But that could have perverse effects.

Recall the favored excuse of miscreants when facing Congress or other interlocutors: "I decline to answer in reliance on the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination."

No risk of criminal prosecution? No right to decline to answer. Which means that pardons could actually make investigation easier.

Heh.

Yes -- exactly. The stunning hypocrisy (justification for me, but not for thee) is the product of narcissism and immaturity.

But follow the argument where it leads -- to the by-now inescapable conclusion that those characteristics are manifestations of a bona fide pathology.

A 2007 academic study found that

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center

(Bottom line? Liberals can process inconsistent inputs better than conservative brains. Conservatives tended to ignore the inconsistencies.)

We see their unwillingness to condemn (or willingness to commit) crimes committed with "good motives" as deeply contradictory; they are simply unable to see the contradiction. The authors of the study refused to judge the differences they saw, but the political correctness rings hollow after the last eight years of dysfunction.

So when you see conservatives and split-the-difference apologists dealing with the fundamental conflict between professed belief and accepted action by pretending they don't exist, understand that what you are seeing is a form of pathology. When you see these same people ascribing magical powers to the Great Deciderer, know that the reason for such nonsense shows up on brain scans.

So it isn't just a difference of opinion. It isn't just politics. And it isn't something we can expect them to reason their way past.

It's pathological.

More:

http://bluememe.blogspot.com/2007/09/conservative-brain.html

Horrible, toxic stuff, I know. Tempted to reject the argument because you don't like where it leads? That's what causes fundamentalists to reject evolution. It's what led the Church to introduce Galileo to the Inquisition.

But Darwin and Galileo were right.

The contradiction is so blatant that no human with a functional brain could miss it.

And yet...

So which is it -- do they see, and ignore, or simply not see?

I find it difficult to believe that that they see and ignore. It is possible, of course, but that kind of core cognitive dissonance takes considerable effort to maintain, and is highly corrosive. It should result in spectacular displays of decompensation -- high-profile moments of matter-antimatter collisions when the "I'm fine, really" facade comes tumbling down. But by all indications, most of them sleep well, untroubled by such complex machinations.

Which leaves only that they are incapable of seeing the massive contradictions -- that their brains are not, in a some essential sense, functional.

I know psychology is in a sense OT, but asking "why" questions is not. And I am very interested in (OK, obsessed by) the next big question: why is it that the logically inescapable is, in fact, escaped?

I understand why you won't go there, Glenn. But I submit that you, and we, will never reach the nub until we do.

This amateur shrink will gladly defer to your general Dx of character disorder.

I'm just a psychological Diogenes, looking for people honest enough to confront this:

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center

and take its implications seriously.

That's two for the pathology hypothesis. One more and we'll be a movement.

Not to minimize the unforgivable pain the Mukasey DOJ has put him through, but as a practical matter, can't he just run out the clock at this point? Is there anything more they can realistically do to him between now and 1/20? I would hope the new team would (at the very least) decline to prosecute.

And an ironic legal pun:

In common law, a writ of qui tam is a writ whereby a private individual who assists a prosecution can receive all or part of any penalty imposed. Its name is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning "[he] who sues in this matter for the king as [well as] for himself."

In a just world, Tam would be rewarded rather than punished. Perhaps someday we will live in one.