Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, said yesterday that the American system “worked” with Nixon, because a corrupt president was driven from office, the same system has “failed tragically” when it comes to Bush. “Nixon and his men lied and abused the constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped,” Bernstein explained. “The Bush Administration — especially its top officials named above and others familiar to most Americans — was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a (Republican) bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush, and that our elected representatives in Congress and our judiciary had been courageous enough to do their duty and hold the President and his aides accountable.”
* Justice Scalia described the 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling yesterday as “water over the deck — get over it.” Moreover, Justice Kennedy added that Al Gore’s lawyers were responsible for bringing the case to the courts in the first place, while former Justice O’Connor said the outcome of the election would have been the same even if the court had not intervened. All three are entirely wrong.
* There is something deeply amusing about the idea of the president using a 747 to travel from DC to Wilmington, Delaware, and back, in order to make “a sales pitch for [his] plan to reduce projected gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years.” As The Plank put it, “Maybe the next time Bush wants to talk about reducing energy consumption he should, you know, not gratuitously consume energy in the process.”
* McCain suggested, on the air, that initial polling about Bush announced his escalation policy showed that Americans approved of the idea. Greg Sargent sets the record straight.
* Chuck Hagel argued last night that Dick Cheney “underestimates the people of this country” if the VP believes people oppose escalation because they “do not have the stomach to complete this mission.”
* On a related note, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said today that Cheney’s boasts about progress in Iraq are “delusional…. I don’t understand how he can continue to say those things when the president calls them a slow failure.”
* No, climate change skeptics don’t deserve “equal time.” (thanks to L.J. for the tip)
* Muckraker: “Senate Democrats aren’t dropping the issue of whether the administration is pushing out federal prosecutors in order to replace them with handpicked successors.”
* In related news, “a veteran Little Rock, Ark., attorney has lodged the first constitutional challenge to the Bush administration’s attempt to appoint a U.S. attorney without seeking Senate approval.”
* Al Gore fans in the audience will definitely enjoy Tim Dickinson’s new piece in Rolling Stone on why the former Vice President is the “ideal” candidate for 2008.
* Two election workers in Ohio were convicted yesterday for their role in short-circuiting a precinct’s recount process immediately after the 2004 presidential election. Erie County prosecutor Kevin Baxter said that the workers weren’t driven by partisanship; they were just lazy. “This was not done for political reasons,” Baxter said. “It was so you didn’t have to do a full hand recount. Politics didn’t matter.”
* Stephen Colbert explains some of the flaws in Bush’s health-care policy as only he can.
* And, finally, after getting trounced in her misguided Senate bid, former Rep. Katherine Harris was supposed to go away. No such luck. Paul Bedard published pictures of the humiliated Florida Republican at the State of the Union, distributing her business cards to GOP lawmakers in the chamber.
If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.