Paul Waldman says that the the media is missing the point about Phil Gramm -- his comments are crazy, but the real scandal is how close such an economic reactionary is to John McCain:
McCain was quick to distance himself from the remark, of course, though he should have seen it coming. The two men have been friends for years, and McCain campaigned vigorously for Gramm's abysmal 1996 presidential bid. McCain no doubt knows that for his entire career Gramm has shared with Jesse Helms an unwillingness to work too hard to dress up his repellent views. Most members of his party labor mightily to portray their trickle-down economic philosophy as driven by the interests of regular folks; Karl Rove once argued that President Bush’s plan to eliminate the tax on stock dividends was an effort to help “the little guy.” Gramm, on the other hand, is quite willing to tell you that as far as he’s concerned, regular folks can go straight to hell. Once, when a colleague argued that a change to Social Security would harm 80-year-old retirees, Gramm replied, “Most people don’t have the luxury of living to be 80 years old, so it’s hard for me to feel sorry for them.”
And Ryan Grim reviews Jane Mayer’s new book about the Bush administration and torture:
The combination has led to perhaps the deepest and broadest chronology yet of the path from September 11 to the authorization of torture in the abstract — including, she reports, gouging out eyeballs and “slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or in disabling a tongue or limb” — to its implementation at black sites, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan.
Mayer marshals much of her evidence against “Cheney’s Cheney,” David Addington, the vice president’s counsel who replaced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby as his chief of staff when he resigned amid his indictment. Addington is a sharp-elbowed right-wing ideologue vested in increasing the power of the executive over that of Congress and the courts. He was often the last person to see documents or executive orders before they went to the president and helped shape the crucial Office of Legal Counsel memos that justified torture and other executive encroachments. A longtime Cheney ally, he drafted a congressional report in the 1980s arguing that President Reagan was justified in funding the Nicaraguan Contras even though Congress had outlawed it.
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