As Billmon and others have pointed out, what Bonzo did was very different from what Bonzo said.

But his rhetoric (and his actions in the form of support for the Convention Against Torture) were blatantly outside the permitted spectrum for modern Versailles. Which raises an interesting question: Why is St. Ronnie still their god head?

A couple of obvious answers:

1) He managed to ride off into the sunset with the same cheesecloth-covered lens he came in with; the evils he unleashed took years to mature. Bush/Cheney committed the sin of being in charge when the wheels came off. In short, right place, right time.

2) Ronnie was a good liar (or so clueless that one script was as real as another); Bush/Cheney are bad liars, perhaps in part because they are such misanthropes that they want to blurt out the truth: "Yes, by God, we tortured! Deal with it."

3) Whatever was in the Kool-Aid, 20 years ago people drank it. There is no there there in Republican-land. There is no bedrock principle (beyond accretion of power and money). So they can only invoke the symbols of success, and pray for lightning to strike again.

Of course, the reasoning is tautological, but that is true of at many of their "truths." (Almost everything else is false; defensible if-then propostions are virtually absent.)

1. The sarcasm is dead-on, and should be devastating. But the recent study of the reaction of conservatives to the Colbert Report makes me think that sarcasm and satire are wasted on the folks who should be shamed by it.

2. When two examples of the same behavior are treated very differently, it strongly suggests that something other than the behavior explains the difference. One of the biggest differences between those so-called conservatives judge harshly and those they seek to excuse is, of course, who did it. But there is another. I just looked through the meticulous records that still exist, 70 years later, of my grandfather's time in Dachau and Buchenwald. Now there is video of the UAE torture, and there is outrage. And 90-plus video recordings of the torture done in my name (that we know of) have been officially destroyed, and there is denial. That suggests that the Bush Administration understood the key difference between what gets prosecuted and what doesn't.

Somewhat off topic, but a thought just occurred:

Condi and others are now at pains to tell us that the Bush team was careful to do only what is/was legal.

So... what if somebody got up the gumption to ask them the "when did you stop beating your life partner?" questions:

Were there other techniques that you considered that you did NOT use?

Did you determine that those unused techniques ARE torture?

Are you saying that that the gloves stayed on, and you were willing to let the law stop you from doing everything you could to protect us?

And if you did stop short, then shouldn't we place some of the blame on you if we are attacked again?

From that condescending circle, it is frequently heard that online and blog commentary is "unreliable" and even harmful because it has no standards, because the online rabble can say anything they want, because anonymity permits reckless attacks and breeds mean-spirited gossip. Apparently, though, if that exact same anonymous, standards-less, malicious, fact-free chatter is placed under the banner of The New Republic (or the NYT or The Washington Post or NBC News) and endowed with the byline of a Serious journalist, then it's magically transformed into "reporting."

To you, and to many in the blogosphere, this graf lays out a fundamental flaw in the journalistic machine.

To the ink-stained wretches, I suspect it parses like "water is wet" -- so positively obvious as to carry normative weight in their eyes.

On a separate note, Glenn, did you see Walter Pincus' piece in CJR?

http://www.cjr.org/essay/newspaper_narcissism_1.php?page=all

Much to like, but this:

Part of the explanation for this lack of knowledge is the emergence of the idea, among reporters in Washington and perhaps elsewhere, that we should avoid socializing or developing friendships with public officials—even those who are our peers. As a result of this artificial separation, public figures remain one-dimensional to many journalists; they have no wives, children, or lives outside their professional positions.

Not to me. After fifty years of living and working in Washington, I’ve had personal friends in Congress, on federal court benches, in high government positions, even in the White House. We should be measured by our work, not by what we say or do elsewhere. I certainly hope that as witnesses to wars, civil-rights riots, peace marches, famines, and terrorist events these past decades, we all have developed opinions which at times we may discuss or even argue about—or we just are not human.

Such experiences make us better observers and thus better reporters. With more and more PR peddled as news, journalists need the experience to sort out what really is news, and to deliver it in context.

is incredibly myopic.

DCLaw1 is right, of course. But let's not lose sight of WHY they are so happy to tie Pelosi to the story.

The MSM villagers are complicit here. They want the story to go away. And, they think, the quickest way to accomplish that is to gore the other side's oxen. "What? My team has dirty hands, too? Issue, be gone, then!"

I suspect they are calculating correctly when it comes to most of the Dems on the Hill. But not for Glenn, or for me. For us, the principle is not, to coin a phrase, fixed 'round the policy. The principle transcends the policy, and the politics. And so Pelosi's possible role only increases my interest is investigation and prosecution.