ONE: She thinks the Vietnam War was a mistake with tragic consequences for civilians across Southeast Asia.

TWO: She thinks the Bush administration’s pre-war statements about Iraq intelligence were misleading.

THREE: She thought the “surge” would not produce an enduring solution to Iraq’s political problems.

FOUR: She favors prosecuting terrorists in normal courts rather than kangaroo courts.

FIVE: She thinks George W. Bush was a generally crappy president.

With the exception of point four, I honestly don’t understand how anyone could even begin to disagree with any of this. On point four, the complaint amounts to something like “she supports the policy of the Obama administration, rather than the policy of the Republican Party.” But of course she does! To be honest, given that she was a pretty regular newspaper columnist and occasional blogger, I find it a bit shocking that they don’t have anything better on her. It’s hard to write on current affairs without occasionally saying something that’s totally wrong or incredibly dumb. But the right’s oppo team has come up with . . . nothing . . . other than that she’s not a conservative. Which is what happens when the conservative candidate loses an election and the new team comes in.

Beyond pettiness and sour grapes, one thing that comes through here is the extent to which the conservative movement just can’t quit George W. Bush. Nominally, the right’s new view is that Bush really was a bad president, but he was bad because he wasn’t conservative enough or something. But show a conservative a liberal who’s subjected Bush to the strongly-worded criticism he so richly deserves, and it’s like waving a cape in the face of a bull. Out comes the whole message operation, the smear machine, the whole deal to defend the sterling record of Bush, Bush’s policies, and the view that anyone who criticized them is borderline treasonous.

This leads Kevin Drum to remark:

I’ve been mulling this ever since Cheney started spouting off a few weeks ago, and I still haven’t really made up my mind about it. Does an outgoing administration owe an incoming one silence? I don’t think that’s always been the case (historians please correct me here if I’m wrong), and I wonder if it really should be. Sure, it would be unseemly for ex-presidents and their staffs to engage in partisan feeding frenzies after they leave office, but is there really any reason why they should all take vows of silence? If Cheney thinks torture and warrantless wiretapping are vital to the nation’s security, then maybe he should go ahead and say so. Why not?

I think the “don’t criticize your successor” rule only makes sense as prudential advice. Not only is Dick Cheney not a credible messenger, but him speaking out looks like sour grapes and it’s all vaguely absurd. The prudent ex-president or ex-veep tries to shift into high-minded elder statesman terrain rather than slumming it à la Cheney.

But as a substantive rule, a “keep quiet” doctrine wouldn’t make sense. It was a good thing that Al Gore brought the credibility and perspective he had as a former Vice President to bear and criticized the invasion of Iraq. And even though I tend not to agree with Cheney on the merits of issues, there’s no denying that he’s been able to look at these things up close so if he thinks it’s important for him to speak out I have no procedural objection to that. It’s just that you’d have to be pretty dumb to actually think it makes sense to take advice from a guy with Cheney’s record.

Recently we’ve heard an awful lot from Dick Cheney, considering that widely loathed former Vice Presidents tend to lay low. Turns out some Republicans aren’t thrilled with the trend:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input. [...] Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”

I’m not sure that voting no on everything and calling for a spending freeze really qualifies as “rebuilding” but I suppose recognizing that people don’t like Dick Cheney shows that we’re all living in a common universe.

Meanwhile, during this time hostile nations such as North Korea and Iran have become bigger proliferation threats than ever!

Mark Goldberg brings us some very welcome news from the recently signed omnibus appropriations bill, the odious Nethercutt Amendment policy has been reversed. What’s the Nethercut Amendment? Well of course as is well known the Bush administration didn’t much care for the International Criminal Court. It wasn’t initially obvious, however, exactly how opposed to it they were. But not only did they refuse to participate in the ICC, they backed an amendment by Rep George Nethercutt that made it so that a country could only get foreign aid if it agreed to sign an agreement immunizing Americans against ICC prosecution. This was back in 2004, before it was clear that the key policymakers were so committed to this because they were actually in the midst of committing war crimes.

At any rate, this put a lot of countries in a tough spot. As Mark says:

A number of America’s allies declined to enter into these side agreements because they believed their obligations to the ICC prevented them from doing so. They were punished accordingly. Meanwhile, the administration, too, had chose between its opposition to the court and other — arguably more important — diplomatic and foreign policy priorities.

And now the policy is dead. And I, for one, won’t be missing it.

Ana Marie Cox does a webchat for The Washington Post:

Singapore: Obama likes comics; can he learn anything from Watchmen?

Ana Marie Cox: We can all learn something from the Watchmen. Personally, I hope he repeals the law against costumed vigilantes soon.

More seriously (tho not totally so), I think Cheney and Bush modeled their presidency on Ozymandias.

I like the idea of the Ozymandias reference, but I’m not sure that I actually get it. By contrast, though you shouldn’t click the links unless you want an implicit Watchmen spoler, Ronald Reagan actually did attempt to base his second-term approach to US-Soviet relations in part on a hypothetical version of the Ozymandias strategy. And though the argument was kind of odd, it actually went hand-in-hand with a brave and correct policy stance that helped contribute to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

A distressing number of people in the comments to this post were not just disagreeing with the things I’ve said about Afghanistan (which is fair enough) but instead asserting that I’ve been failing to address the topic out of some kind of cowardly desire to follow someone else’s lead. If you’re curious, though, you can always check out this list of posts tagged “Afghanistan.”

But to sum up my thoughts, I don’t think we should be heading for the exits in Afghanistan just yet. We have an interest in doing more to fight al-Qaeda and in weaken pro-Qaeda Taliban factions. Meanwhile, public opinion in Afghanistan is still reasonably friendly to the foreign military presence. I do, however, think it’s important that we set ourselves up to end the war sooner rather than later—that means lowering expectations and setting realistic goals.

I don’t know how to evaluate the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I’ve heard plausible strategic visions for Afghanistan that involve sending more troops their. But the administration decided to announce the increase in force-levels before announcing the results of their strategic review. That decision about the sequence of events doesn’t seem very smart to me. But the decision about the sequence is going to be much less consequential than the actual results of the review and the most important thing there is going to be goals. I think if we could do history over again, the smart thing to have done would have been to have stayed out of Iraq. Then in 2002 and 2003, when the United States was very popular in Afghanistan we would have had more resources available to provide more comprehensive security and do more comprehensive development. Having made a bad decision to invade Iraq, if we’d started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2005 I think that still would have been soon enough to “go big” in Afghanistan—to send in more resources, more development, and to adopt a deeper, more ambitious, more comprehensive strategy. Even if we’d done what congressional Democrats wanted to and started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2007 this might have worked.

But none of those things happened. Consequently, we reached a point where the Afghan public is losing patience with us. There are things we can do to try to turn that around in the short-run—killing fewer civilians should help—but either way I think it means that we need to start looking for plausible offramps: A relatively narrow set of political and military goals combined with a willingness to cut deals with just about anyone willing to cut deals with us.

Needless to say, support for marijuana legalization is pretty much a “fringe” view in national politics. And it certainly doesn’t have majority support. And yet put it in perspective and this is what you get.

In a lot of ways, the Bush administration always struck me as a group of people who were just so impressed with their own shamelessness and dishonesty that they wildly exaggerated the extent to which lying about stuff is a useful governing tool. They loved the game, they loved the gamesmanship, they held the public in contempt, experts in more contempt, and the press in even more contempt, and so they just went and did it.

Former President George W. Bush’s first confirmed speaking engagement since leaving office will take him from Crawford to Canada.

Invitations to the event, billed as “a conversation with George W. Bush,” say that the former president will “share his thoughts on his eight momentous years in the Oval Office” during a March 17 speech in Calgary, Alberta. [...] But the Canadian firm organizing the lunch has paid sizable fees to Lance Armstrong, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan. Former President Bill Clinton was paid $150,000 for a March 2006 speech in Edmonton, according to a Canadian newspaper.

But don’t go too hard on our Canadian friends, Alberta is sort of like the Alaska of Canada—an unusually right-wing petrostate where things like working relentlessly to doom the planet to ecological catastrophe are considered worthy of high praise.

Rather, the appeal of the location was its ambiguous legal status. Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, not the United States of America. But since the Cuban Revolution of 1958, we’ve had no Status of Forces Agreement with Cuba authorizing the presence of an American military base. Consequently, argued the Bush administration, neither Cuban nor American law applied there. This was somewhat daft if you ask me, albeit clever, but whatever you think of the merits of the argument that is why the prisoners were sent there. The Bush team never felt it was unsafe to send prisoners to Fort Leavenworth or to the supermax prison in Colorado, they just didn’t want to be in a position where they had to follow the law.

Nor did the furor over the case break along neat liberal-conservative lines, as demonstrated by statements made in 2007 by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California who is considered moderate to liberal. “It is true that the bullet left Aldrete-Davila permanently injured and that what the agents did was wrong,” the senator said. “But it is also true that Aldrete-Davila was not likely a low-level wrongdoer who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I don’t really understand what the relevance of these considerations are supposed to be. I take it that the federal maximum security prisons are filled with people who aren’t “low-level wrongdoer[s] who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But still if you were to wade into such a prison and go on a killing spree, that wouldn’t be okay. It would be a big deal! Mass-murder! There’s no special rule where it’s okay to shoot at people as long as they’re “bad guys.”

For example, unpaid Bush shill Fred Barnes recently wrote “for the editors” of the Weekly Standard that “Bush had 10 great achievements (and maybe more) in his eight years in the White House.” Among his undisputed successes on the foreign policy front were “enhanced interrogation of terrorists”, “the rebuilding of presidential authority” and “the surge”.

That an organ of conservative opinion would tout Bush’s moves toward torture and autocracy should be shocking. Notably absent from Barnes’s list was Bush’s decision to launch the invasion of Iraq in the first place, so the best that one of Bush’s most ardent defenders can say is that Bush managed to partially ameliorate one of his worst calls. That should change hearts and minds all right.

The vast majority of the country hates Bush, as is appropriate, but a substantial majority seems to have undergone a hideous moral and intellectual transformation into Bush’s image.

In 2007, George W. Bush spoke of a desire to “replenish the ol’ coffers” with post-presidential speaking engagements. Daniel Gross has an appealing theory indicating that this won’t work:

For many of President Bush’s critics, the fact that he is now seeking work in the worst job market in a generation is poetic justice. As Bush noted in his farewell press conference, he is too much of a Type A for “the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, sitting on some beach.” (He might want to reconsider: Thanks to the recession, tropical resorts are running great promotions.)

Given recent history, Bush probably expects to profit from ex-presidency. Bill Clinton reported income of more than $90 million from 2000-07. But Bush is very unlikely to earn Clintonian numbers. Ex-presidents peddle image, presence, and experience. In Bush’s case, each is tarnished. To aggravate matters, many of the industries in which ex-presidents make easy money are a) doing poorly, and b) based in the Washington-Boston corridor where Bush hostility runs deep.

I think this is probably wrong and at the end of the day Bush’s unpopularity will probably have only a mild negative impact on his future earnings. For one thing, itt’s a mistake to try to generalize about which industries are the ones “in which ex-presidents make easy money.” Bush’s actions in office should have earned him the undying loyalty of the core GOP business base in the oil, coal, pharmaceutical, defense contracting, and agribusiness industries. It’s true that given the recession these firms may not be able to be as generous as they would in other times. But by the same token, their continued profitability depends heavily on their ability to convince today’s politicians that loyal friends of industry will be taken care of. If Bush really wants money, the money will be found.

President Bush had strong nerves. President Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not.

Once again, from reading this homages to the genius of Bush-era counterterrorism you would never know that an order of magnitude more Americans were killed by transnational Islamist terrorists under George W. Bush’s watch than under all previous presidents combined. Barnes here seems to think that Bush’s nerves of steel are what allowed to him finally nail Osama bin Laden, but the missing part of the picture here is when Bush let bin Laden get away and he’s still at large years later with no real prospects for the U.S. killing or capturing him. It’s a disgrace.

Except the evidence suggests that that isn’t actually how politics works. The evidence is that public opinion is largely incoherent, that voters do much more rationalizing than reasoning, and that people have little information about what politicians are doing or saying anyway. What matters for political sense is a few big, crude factors. And the Bush administration, whatever you say about them, seems to me to have basically understood this. There was a lot of sentiment in December 2000 and January 2001 that the weird nature of Bush’s accession to the presidency meant that he not only would but had to basically ditch his governing agenda in favor of a more centrist posture. The Bushies correctly ascertained that whether or not he succeeded in getting bipartisan glamor shots three and a half years earlier was going to have nothing to do with his re-election prospects. They saw that a President has certain powers to shape policy, that the vast majority of policy decisions have no impact whatsoever on voter behavior, and that the best thing you can do is just press ahead with what you think is best.

Unfortunately for the world, George W. Bush’s ideas about what’s best are stupid and morally deficient. And that, of course, completely vitiates whatever virtues his methods may have had.

After something happens, it can begin to seem inevitable. The extent to which the actual has its origins deep in the past, and the present-day has been unfolding for decades, becomes clear to us all. On occasion, it’s useful to have a jarring reminder that things didn’t always seem that way. Here, for example, Joschka Fischer, a very admirable and savvy foreign policy thinker and the German Foreign Minister who tried to lead opposition to the invasion of Iraq, recalls how things seemed to him eight years ago:

We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.

Needless to say: Oops.

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

And, look, the idea of enforcing the laws inherently involves the idea of looking backwards. If John Yoo walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot a guy in the head, we wouldn’t say “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” even though it would be as true as ever that it’s important to look forward. And more than one person has died as a result of Bush-era torture policies. The idea of an accountability-free executive is bound to have some appeal to a new administration. On the one hand, embracing it earns you plaudits for bipartisanship. On the other hand, you’re the executive now, so why not embrace it? But for the rest of us it’s not such a great deal.

UPDATE: And recall Brian Beutler’s point here that the illegality of, say, waterboarding was an established principle of American law for decades before Bush came around. We tried Japanese soldiers as war criminals for doing it during World War II. And it’s not like we took “well you have to understand, the Americans were a serious security threat” to be a viable defense.