Good Column

Now this is the way to retire.

"Meanwhile, the dictatorial presidency that supposedly died with Watergate is alive and, if anything, more malignant. Not even Richard Nixon asserted inherent power to detain people indefinitely in secret prisons or to put them to torture. Confronted with his own words as evidence that he broke the law, Nixon resigned. Confronted with its own words that it ignored the law, the Bush administration sets out to jail whoever revealed the truth and, more likely, the journalists to whom they spoke it.

And to think that Bill Clinton was impeached over a sex scandal. If any president has deserved impeachment, it is George Bush, and his vice president and defense secretary with him. For the manipulation of intelligence agencies. For deluding themselves, and in turn the nation and the world, into a tragic war with insufficient force to win it and no plan for a responsible conclusion. And for deliberately and persistently violating a law written to keep Big Brother in check.

The worst of our peril is the willful ignorance of a president who practically boasts that he reads and hears only what his staff selects for him.

It would be instructive to learn how much shadow president Dick Cheney had to do with selecting the staff. And above all, who really chose Cheney."