How Character Corrodes, By MAUREEN DOWD

[jefferson_dem]

How Character Corrodes
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

How quaint.

The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.

The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”

Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run “roughshod” and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that “there’s no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government.”

Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”

This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)

After so many years of watching a White House upend laws, I now listen raptly when President Obama plays the constitutional law professor. He was asked at his news conference Wednesday night about the Republican fear that he will “ride roughshod over any opposition” and establish one-party rule.

<SNIP>

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/opinion/03dowd.html?_r=1

[pscot]

1. Rather odd little essay

Midway through she does a right oblique and rides off in a completely new direction.

[jefferson_dem]

2. Sometimes I wonder if MoDo simply rattles off "stream of thought" reflections

that goes directly to print.

She hits her stride at the end.

As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”

“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”

Class dismissed.

[ensho]

6. isn't all writing "stream of thought"?

or is "reflections" your operative word?

[uberblonde]

3. Strange.

She really needs to start reading Glenn Greenwald.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. from an expert on corroded characters no less.

[Forkboy]

7. My first thought as well.

[Joe Bacon]

5. Yes, the pot is calling the kettle black here...

Because nobody is more morally corroded than Whoreen Dowd!

[Beacool]

8. Whoreen Dowd................

:rofl:

[Orsino]

9. Years late, Dowd adds nothing new.

Still a waste of inches.