Nixon Rides Again: It's only illegal when the president agrees it's illegal.

[struggle4progress]

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, May 17, 2007, at 7:13 PM ET

~snip~ The story isn't who picked on a sick guy or even who did or didn't break laws. The story is who gets to decide what's legal. And the president's now-familiar claim, a la Richard Nixon, is that it's never illegal when he does it. ~snip~

.. Comey never conceded that DoJ certification of the classified program was legally unnecessary. He seems merely to have said that the administration may not have believed it was legally necessary. Indeed, when Specter asked whether "the certification by the Department of Justice as to legality was indispensable as a matter of law," Comey said he believed that it was. He said, twice, and most carefully, that while he was not a presidential scholar, there were those who argued "that because the head of the executive branch determined that it was appropriate to do, that that meant for purposes of those in the executive branch it was legal." Comey added that he disagreed with that conclusion. ~snip~

It's impossible to draw neat lines around which elements of the mushrooming U.S. attorneys scandal violate the law and which are encompassed in Bush's larger worldview that life happens at the pleasure of the president. But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing? ~snip~

The bad guys were winning for a while because they picked the teams, set the rules, sidelined the referees, and turned off all the lights in the stadium. Congress has some work to do. It needs to drill down on what this mystery eavesdropping program was (and which worse mystery eavesdropping program it replaced) and to get to the bottom of the Yoo memos and what else they've authorized. Let's call the Comey testimony the halftime show. With the refs in and the lights finally on, this might just prove to be an interesting game after all.

http://www.slate.com/id/2166468/

[Kagemusha]

1. Here's what I think is the critical issue here.

"But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing?"

Take the POV of the mainstream media. How do they WANT the President to have ever broken a law, knowing that might lead to impeachment, disruption, the removal of a War President defending their very lives? How is it that they WANT to know that he's broken a law, if indeed he has? Why do they WANT to know this? It doesn't serve their interests to know. It doesn't serve the country's interests to have a War President impeached; they have long ago decided this. Continuity and security are the top priorities... so why rock the boat?

The only type of President who can offer absolute political security for the remainder of his term is the President who can literally do nothing wrong... so that is what ends up being supported.

[struggle4progress]

2. The so-called mainstream media serves specific corporate interests, namely

the interests of the advertisers and owners. As long as media ownership was spread among a number of companies, competition guaranteed some variety in news content. But "free markets" naturally produce monopolies when there is no aggressive regulation, so the dismantling of the regulatory system has produced a system in which a small number of mega-corporations control production and distribution. Companies like General Electric, Sony, Seagram, and AT&T have multiple industrial interests, beyond their media holdings, and the newsroom coverage is no longer insulated from pressures to defend such interests.

In a nutshell: the very people we expected to tell us what's happenin, have their own economic and political reasons to keep us in the dark, so there's a lotta stuff we ain't hearin about. They ain't blowin the whistle on W's gang cuz they're gettin to break pollution laws, they're gettin tax breaks, they're gettin no-bid contracts, and so on ...

[bemildred]

3. "The President is not King." -- Nancy Pelosi

In the US, the people are sovereign, not the President.