Glenn Said: What mental process allows a person like Jackson Diehl or Fred Hiatt to declare that their own Government is exempt from the rule of law and the most basic international norms yet still believe they are in a position to condemn other governments for insufficient regard for the rule of law and human rights?

Orwell called it "DoubleThink". 1984 is an essential resource for modern political analysis.

I know it is considered impolite and inappropriate to pathologize wingnuttery. But I mean this as a serious question: are these people genetically immune to the strictures of logic? Is pointing out their hypocrisy the analog of describing colors to the congenitally blind? The only difference between the article Glenn eviscerates and a laugher from The Onion is location, location, location. I don't think the WaPo is trying to be funny here, so something else must explain this phenomenon.

I have seen some interesting nurture-based explanations for the inability of conservatives to tolerate ambiguity. But this kind of self-parody seems to reflect an even deeeper issue.

Perhaps someday gene therapy will address the problem. Logic seems far too blunt an instrument.

Wa Post: "The president must have the legal flexibility to detain those against whom there is credible, actionable intelligence but not enough evidence to bring charges."

The amount of evidence needed to bring a charge in the US is probable cause (I believe). It doesn’t take much evidence to have probable cause to arrest someone in the US, and in many cases, law enforcement officers bend the definition of probable cause to encompass far more than it should already allow. The idea that the president can arrest and permanently detain people on just suspicion (not even reasonable suspicion, but mere suspicion) of wrongdoing is so crazy and un-American that it reeks of Mussolini and fascism.

But this is what happens when fear meets ignorance. We don’t do a good job imparting the values of what our government is about to the citizens. And we haven’t been doing a good job of it for a long time. Nationalism has replaced civics. And the Republican party is the party of nationalism, jingoism and fear. No pun intended, but I think there is hope on the Democratic side. It needs to start in Congress, the House in particular. We need to make our reps aware that we won’t stand for this any longer.

The Washington Post, along with Murdoch's empire, are leading advocates of mercantilism in the US. That explains both their political position and their willingness to lecture the rest of the world. Putin's government DARED to interfere in the SACRED American right to property. Human rights are meaningless, we are a culture where business rights are the be all and end all of morality. By seizing American corporate property to appease Russian interests, the Putin government committed the sins of Castro and Chavez within their respective administrations, and, as Cuba proves, when you anger the sugar companies or Exxon, the US has a LONG memory and no end of sermonizing ability.

We have become the Britain of the American revolution, famous for hypocrisy all over the world, allowing nothing and no one to interfere in the process of making our wealthy wealthier. seeing our own economic system as designed and administered by God and therefore sacred. Since the art of propaganda has come a long way in the past 200 years, we've even managed to convince most of our laboring class of the divine nature of their poverty, and the capitalist class has perfected the subversion of the educational system with the aim of ensuring that no new Jefferson or Franklin or Madison arises to challenge this new sacred Business Empire from within.

In this case, the Post is pretty much in touch with middle America. Most Americans lack the education needed to examine the situation and realize the sheer idiocy of the American position. They no longer have the ability to step outside themselves and realize that their self interests are not the interests of the Divine, that American priorities are not those of God. The Post, honestly or for the sake of circulation, is catering to the mercantile interests that retain control over the government of the US, nothing more nor less than that.

Breathed's Opus of 7/27/08, published by Salon, made this very point.

It's almost impossible to envisage a way out of the government by money mess we've gotten ourselves into, and honestly, to paraphrase Jefferson, I grow anxious when I reflect that God is vigilant and just.

You forget that we're also the only ones who get to decide who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

There is a condition in which behavior that you consider acceptable for you to do, you also consider morally and ethically wrong for others to do.

It is called sociopathy.

"I come to a different conclusion on the facts, and I think that you mostly try to criminalize policy differences."

The failsafe bridge for cognitive dissonance. Government breaking the law and then changing the law/immunizing against the law/pardoning the crime/commuting the punishment are policy options that are legal and valid. This allows a person to hold on to the belief that the government in question remains the legitimate authority and not culpable.

Kudos to Elephantman. That is probably exactly how Diehl thinks: Criticize abroad = standing up for principle. Criticize at home = "criminalize policy differences".

"OK, in the US, it's not the "state owned press", but rather the press owned by those with some of the most influential connections in government."

Influential connections, ie lobbyists who dictate laws and policies.

For "state owned press", substitute "press owned state!"

"I come to a different conclusion on the facts, and I think that you mostly try to criminalize policy differences." -- Elephantman

In Limbaugh-land and FOX-world, breaking the law may be called 'a policy difference', but in the reality-based community that nonsense is considered .. nonsense.

If they do it, it's bad. If we do it, it's good.

Call it exceptionalism or double-think, but rational discourse it is not.

When and if a Day of Accountability comes, these corporate journo-whores should be publicly humiliated for their eager fluffing of the Bush regime -- not that they seem capable of shame.