I think Bush/Cheney, and an undetermined  contingent of the Republican Party, have not necessarily lost anything by their time in the WH, despite that fact that Republican operatives outside this group have correctly noted that the Republican brand is "dog food" thanks to them.

In 2001, at the start of this nightmare, the Bush Administration earned the gratitude of Bill Clinton by putting  the stopper on a Republican investigation of Janet Reno:

The first time Bush asserted executive privilege, in 2001, he inherited claims from the Clinton administration. Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, was demanding information from the Justice Department pertaining to the tenure of the former attorney general, Janet Reno, but the Bush administration refused, saying it would set a bad precedent. Burton backed down.

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Prof. Sandy Levinson, at the highly respected site Balkinization, has an article on the dangers of having a President who was not impeached, survived (unlike Nixon) to the end of his term, and is now free to wreak as much chaos on the Adminisration of his successor as he cares to, knowing that he faces no obstacles and has nothing to lose and everything to gain by some final "experiments"  in misrule.

The damage that Bush wreaked with his raid on Syria, whose only purpose of significance was to derail SOFA, sets the stage for his successor to run into difficulties of a helicopters-in-Saigon variety in Iraq- and we know that whoever that President is will not have his popularity elevated as a result.

Likewise, Bush was not authorizing his drones to rain down bombs on Waziristan until the outcome of this election became fairly clear.

 Read Levinson's piece. 

One of Congress' most fateful decisions, in 1999,  was to let the Independent Counsel Act lapse. The reason, evidently, was that President Clinton's impeachment was terribly embarrassing to the Democratic party, so much so, in fact, that Vice-President Al Gore refused to campaign with President Clinton in 2000, and chose  Joe Lieberman, a Democrat bold enough, or sanctimonious enough, to openly denounce President Clinton's behavior, as his running mate. Those who say that Democrats prospered, or Republicans suffered, from these choices- at least, those Democrats-  Gore, and many others swept out in the elections of 2002- are evidently living in a counterfactual universe, akin to the ones in which the Confederacy is detached from the Union to this day.

Democrats took the view that the Republicans had abused the system, which was true- but then forgotten the crucial point, which is, why they had created the system in the first place.? Its function was to keep the Executive in check;  did Democrats ask themselves, as they should have, if this function was still necessary?

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The Syrian raid accomplished very little from a military point of view.

It may have stunning repurcussions politically, however, and I don't mean only in the Middle East.

For certain, it will wreck the SOFA that is crucial to a restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and precondition of 'success' in Iraq. The Iraqis' great- and justified- fear is that the U.S. will use Iraq as Fortress Mesopotamia, from which to launch attacks on its neighbors- as, indeed, it just did.

Iraq's neighbors, most pertinently Iran and Syria, also fear this- despite an asinine LAT article, that sounds as if it were written by Fred Barnes, speculating that Syria may have invited the attack.

They may have- If so, well played on their part. At a time when the U.S. is rousing a nuclear-armed Islamic nation- Pakistan- to fury because of repeated violations of its sovereignty, nothing could damage the U.S.'s reputation even further than to shamelessly violate the sovereignty of yet another Islamic nation, making our hypocrisy in denouncing Russia's violation of Georgia's territorial you-know-what even more egregious, and eliciting new levels of disgust from what once may have been U.S. allies.

The Syrians, too, know that their own ally, Iran, does feel gravely threatened by the U.S. presence in Iraq. And in turn, Iran's closest ally- far closer than Syria itself- is none other than the nation the attacks were launched from.

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So there were 'sixteen more words' of lying to the American people. At this point, with Democrats and Republicans colluding to keep impeachment off the table, and Speaker Pelosi claiming to have seen no evidence of criminality that would induce her to put it back, despite the fact that the founders would have been disgusted with her-

We can assume that we are studying the behavior of this Administration only for academic purposes. 

So I will just note that just as he blackmailed the Bosnians in 2002, threatening to withdraw diplomatic and military aid if the Bosnian government did not comply with his criminal demands, we can note that he is currently  blackmailing the Iraqi Government in a very similar manner. And we can assume that the raid on Syria is connected with this extortion.

Is it any wonder that the American people, too, feel as if they have been the victims of the world's largest racketeering operation? 

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So the Government case says Ivins spent more than a year perfecting his odd strain.

So he could use it to make the case against Iraq, perhaps (as it was known we had provided Iraq with anthrax via Donald Rumsfeld in our perpetual 'paid on both sides' meddling in the region)?

There is no evidence of such a motive anywhere in the Gov't's case.

And it appears that it's mere coincidence that, at the point when he had nearly perfected his methods, such a case became most compelling to the PNAC-addled minds that constitute the Executive Branch and its ancillary regions (OVP), for reasons known to all of us- well I should amend that; it is known they had, in their minds, a compelling case already; let me say rather that such a case became easiest to sell to all concerned.

And then it was mailed to two prominent Senate Democrats.

But Ivins was a registered Democrat.

Motive, please.

Now that the U.S. has engaged in another brutally stupid act, it is time to call attention again to its utterly cynical and completely self-defeating nature.

As another poster has remarked, the past is prologue, so I will start with that:

Overnight, the US has managed to turn the press coverage to its favor by putting out releases that focus on "rat lines" and the like, i.e. "The US and Iraqi government accuse Damascus of being reluctant to guard its borders and not doing enough to stop militants, including those from al-Qaeda, crossing the border into Iraq."

But the real question is why now. Syria has been improving border compliance steadily. Patreaus [sic]announced this month that Syria has brought down infiltration from 100 to 20 a month. [from Syria Comment.]

Well, another answer to 'why now?' would be that now that al-Maliki has ensured that ethnic cleansing made Baghdad a Shiite city, and with U.S. help he prevailed over his Shiite enemies (cf. the battles of Sadr City and Basra, which despite Admin propaganda, could not have been won without U.S. superweapons), he has now turned his attention to the 'Sunni Awakening' who were so fortuitious to Gen. Petraeus' cause. And these Awakened, who were to have been transferred from U.S. to Iraqi payrolls, have discovered that it was better for them when they relied on 'the kindness of strangers.'  

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The criminal, and incompetent U.S. occupation is now spreading the conflict into Syria, whose Iraqi border was just raided by U.S. helicopters.

US military helicopters have attacked an area along Syria's border with Iraq, causing casualties, according to state-run television and witnesses.

A report quoted unnamed Syrian officials and said the area is near the Syrian border town of Abu Kamal. It gave no other details on the attack.

Residents said two helicopters carrying US soldiers raided Hwijeh village, killing seven people and wounding five.

I suggest that it is not unrelated to this development from yesterday, considering that the raid was staged in the Sunni regions of the far west.

And, given the stupidity and obviousness of this Administration, and its complete lack of any kind of strategy but the crudest and most costly- to itself and to life in general- we must look at yet a third development- something whose latest twist actually shocked me just now -

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Thanks to Leen at Oxdown Gazette for this charming story.

It's an excerpt of an interview with "Shadow Factory" author James Bamford, on the NSA wiretapping that the 110th Congress was kind enough to retroactively legalize.

Strangely, from the sound of this interview, they forgot to dismiss the fraud cases against the founder and top executives of one of the two companies that handle the wiretapping; the founder is now a fugitive in Namibia.

If you're lucky enough to use Verizon, you get to be wiretapped by a felon.

(Congress made sure that the wiretapping is not a crime; couldn't they have ensured that it was not done by a criminal, by wiping his record clean, as they have wiped the President's?)

Here is the relevant excerpt, and the link.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It's a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don't know--I don't think they even know that there is--that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive in--hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he's wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to these charges.

So, you know, you've got companies--these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies--through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or another. And it's even--gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don't have a lot of respect for individual rights--Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth.