You think we were alarmists, overstating the case, those of us who spent the last eight years waving our arms wildly trying to draw attention to the fact that the Bush Administration considered itself above and beyond the law?

Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

Who wrote these memos? All but one were crafted in whole or in part by the infamous John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the so-called “torture memos” that redefined torture much more narrowly than the U.S. definition of torture, and counseled the President how to torture and get away with it. In one memo, Yoo said the Justice Department would not enforce U.S. laws against torture, assault, maiming and stalking, in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.

Olbermann quoted somebody last night, I think Scott Horton, to the effect that while we did not fully realize it at the time, we were effectively living in a dictatorship from 2001 through Jan. 20, 2009.

Meanwhile, Crazy Glenn Beck is suddenly very very concerned about government overreaching its power. Doesn’t everyone understand? he implores. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats — it’s about our founding principles!

You’re eight years late to the party, CGB.

Anybody have a connection at Kidrobot? I’ve always thought that Sparky would lend himself well to vinyl…

I’ve been focused on writing next week’s strip and wasn’t paying attention, but you people bought a LOT of magnets since last night.

I’ll get them out as quick as I can! But be patient, this is a new ball in the juggler’s routine that is my ever-evolving career.

An outtake, if you will, from an earlier draft of this week’s cartoon. It’s a good bit, but I was trying to squeeze a lot in and something had to go.

In response to the post below:

I disagree. You’re on the wrong side of history, and you can starve in a gutter alongside Walter Isaacson.

There is little to no -news- on the news, a point your latest comic completely fails to address.

If I want the truth about Iraq, I read Glenn Greenwald.

Henceforth, you won’t be allowed to sell my eyeballs to Salon or anyone else. For what little it is worth, I won’t link, I won’t mention you to friends, and I certainly won’t read your posts or comics.

After deliberately misinforming the American public about Iraq, the MSM deserves a fiery death.

Hell, we’d be better off with Pradva. At least they had the excuse of someone holding a gun to their collective heads.

Sincerely,

Brian D———, ex-reader.

Brian.

(Leaving aside the fact that you certainly won’t see this post, since I’m now dead to you … )

It sounds like you might have a blog. Glenn Greenwald has a blog. I have a blog. We have blogs!

This is a fine thing. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

But while there’s plenty to be learned from Glenn Greenwald’s always-insightful analysis (and perhaps somewhat less so from my various ramblings), can readers turn to any of our blogs this morning and learn about Obama’s secret letter to Russia, the future regulation of Fannie and Freddie, the attack on a Sri Lankan cricket team by gunmen in Pakistan, the memos detailing the power the Bush administration sought, the grassroots uprising against a dam in Japan, the release of a human rights activist in Zimbabwe, the news that Fidel Castro has been spotted taking early morning strolls in Havana, the fact that one in every 31 adults in this country is entangled in the prison system in some way, the specifics of the California joblessness rate, or the impediments facing women in Afghanistan — to name just a few of the stories in today’s New York Times? (And that’s before we even get into weather, sports, the business pages and the arts section.)

No they cannot. At least, not until we start writing about these things because we have read about them in the New York Times, or seen them on CNN, or heard them on NPR or the local AM drive time affiliate, or wherever it is we get the news that we do not go out into the world and gather ourselves.

Please don’t misunderstand. I have been critiquing the mainstream media for a very long time. The epic failure of what passed for “journalism” during the runup to war in 2002 and 2003 was a frequent topic of my cartoon and on this blog. If my latest cartoon fails to drive this point home to your satisfaction, it’s only because I’ve made the point so many times, I assume it’s a given. The entirety of my belief system cannot be restated in every cartoon, at least not until the three-dimensional fully networked hotlinkable meta cartoons of the future become commonplace.

But this is the point, and I am entirely certain Glenn Greenwald would agree: criticizing someone for doing an important job badly does not mean you wish that no one was doing the job at all.

We criticize journalists because we want them to do a better job, not because we want to see their profession eliminated entirely.

That’s what right-wingers want. That’s how right-wingers want to live, in an information-free zone in which facts are supplanted entirely by opinion, in which there’s no need to hear from a reporter on the ground in Fallujah as long as Rush Limbaugh has an opinion on the topic. But it’s not how I want to live.

Update: Glenn Greenwald adds via email:

I agree with you entirely, as you predicted: the problem with the establishment media isn’t that they’re trying to perform a function that shouldn’t be performed (that’s the Right’s critique of the press, actually). The problem is that they perform that function so ineptly and corruptly — or often not at all — and thus it goes unfulfilled.

The point of media criticisms is not to kill off the media, but to make them better.

When reading the new cartoon, remember that I was the one of the very first cartoonists to have an online archive, I think even before Scott Adams; and that I’ve been blogging longer than either Atrios or Markos, and in fact gave both of them some of their earliest links. It is not a reflexive screed against the internet, it is a comment on a world that is changing in ways that are not entirely for the better. With jokes!

Judging from the click-thrus, blogads may be getting tuned out on the level of tv ads these days. But if you click on the ad to your right, you can find out about my latest scheme, magnets handmade and signed by the artist; a very modest attempt to make up for recent lost income. (Be sure to scroll down, in case it’s not obvious — my html skillz are less than mad.)

It wasn’t the best experience I’ve ever had in publishing overall, but man, do I know how to name ‘em or what …

Roy has the rundown on those right wing “tea parties” over at one of those papers I used to run in. And you will not be surprised to learn that the whole “grassroots” campaign — including Rick Santelli’s “spontaneous” rant — appears to have been carefully orchestrated months in advance. (I tried to “write” this post with fewer “air quotes” but it just didn’t “read” the same. “Sorry” about that.)

From an article about the production of “24″ going green, this little tidbit:

Rupert Murdoch, spurred by a presentation by former Vice President Al Gore, said last year that he intended to make News Corporation, Fox’s parent, carbon neutral by 2010, and the network’s campaign, the producers say, is part of that effort.

This is the first I’ve heard about Gore’s influence on Murdoch, which is weird, because you’d think that someone who watches as much Fox News as I do would have noticed when the heads of everyone on that network simultaenously exploded.

Michael Jackson has apparently reached that point in his career trajectory at which it is necessary to sell off many of the things he purchased at previous, more affluent points along that trajectory. One of the items up for auction is a version of the eighties Batman costume fitted over a lifesize statue of … Michael Jackson.

That’s so completely off the scale weird, I’d be tempted to bid on it myself, if times were different, and if I were married to someone willing to share her home with a large creepy Michael-Jackson-in-a-Batman-costume statue. But times are not, and I am not.