One of the depressing things about the battle we have been waging against rampant hypocrisy is that (with a few notable and welcome exceptions) our media and political elites have proven remarkably immune to both facts and logic. Politicians and pundits rarely pay a price for their incoherence. Their milieu is simply unconcerned with such transgressions.

Law professors live in a different world -- a world where logic and facts play a much larger role. (Well, not all of them -- if you have a theory that explains Althouse and the Other Glenn (Reynolds), please share with the class.) When lal profs publish crap, the ridicule of peers has consequences. At the very least, it will be hard for Kerr to ignore Glenn's slings and arrows and hold his head high in the faculty lounge.

So perhaps the real import of this development is that Kerr's inside move creates a real vulnerability. And maybe peeling off peripheral legitimizing characters like Kerr is the best we can hope for in this agonizingly long slog.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but if Sotomayor's Pappas opinion was a dissent, isn't it just an opinion, and not a "ruling" (par. 4, just before the long quote)?

Remember when he said:

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

Dubya was apparently off only in his grammar: he made the mistake of phrasing the opening dependent clause as a future conditional, whereas it is more accurately phrased in the present continuous.

I for one am not terribly mollified that "our" guy is the one now wielding the dictatorial powers.

Perhaps the larger point in your anecdote (and one echoed in my own limited experience) is the near-absolute power trial judges have to tilt cases conclusively against a party they disfavor, and the limited recourse available given the minimal appellate review of such behavior. I'm not sure what the cure is, but few non-litigators are aware of the pervasiveness of the problem.

I started blogging and writing columns almost 5 years ago. It felt like there were just a few of us out in the wilderness trying to get everyone to WTFU and do something about the lawless but still reasonably popular regime in Washington.

And like so many others, I went from cautious optimism to elation when it looked, briefly, as if the changing of the guard represented an end to the reign of emperors.

It is Groundhog Day again. The new administration speaks a different language, but reserves its right to lawlessness. And there are again but a few of us sounding the alarm.

Obama is unlikely to be as awful as Bush in practice. But what I thought was a difference in kind has now been proven a difference only in degree. What sticks in my craw now is that I voted AGAINST the last emperor, so there was no sense of betrayal.

Here's another question I'd like to see answered by the David Broder and the Republicans who embrace Obama's new "maturity":

Obama tells us that "there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States...", and embraces preventative detention for them.

Would you still support this approach if Emperor Obama decided that Dick Cheney fits that definition? After all, as Cheney and so many others told us a few years back, dissent is tantamount to treason...

Obama tells us that "there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States...", and embraces preventative detention for them.

I am a staunch rule of law kinda guy, but if that's how you wanna play it...

So if we can't have our war crimes tribunals for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Addington/Yoo/Bybee, et al., can we at least hold THEM in indefinite detention?

Ultimately, what I find most harmful about his embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his -- Democrats, liberals, progressives -- will defend as well. The more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions... the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.

Absolutely right, and perhaps the bitterest truth of all. For it means that in electing Obama, we won the battle but lost the war. The man who promised to sweep the Aegean stables is now content with slowing the rate at which the shit accumulates.

There will be no judgment at Nuremberg; the rule of law will remain a lefty obsession honored mostly in its breach. There will be no denouement; we will "look forward" to our future as an authoritarian nation, complacent and complicit.

Glenn, your piece seems to adopt a magnanimous, "vive le difference" attitude about the casual attitude of the MSM re: attribution to bloggers vs. our own general willingness to link and credit.

But, as with so much you blog about, the issue (for me) is the damned hypocrisy. We generally live by our rules, which they see as too lax. They claim much higher standards, yet blatantly violate them with impunity. (The MoDo incident is most notable not for the taking, but for the fact that she copped to and corrected her plagiarism. As for the absurdity of her explanation, well, res ipsa loquitur.)

It is a little like a record company whose products consist largely of sampling getting exercised about kids illegally copying their records....