TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. In his column today, Paul Waldman argues that the Bush years have shown us the dark side of a great virtue:
A year and a half before the Bush era comes to its merciful end, cataloging its failures and pathologies has become not merely a cottage industry but a kind of mass mobilization, a task so vast that it requires the combined efforts of thousands of writers, talkers, thinkers, activists, and ordinary citizens. Every new look at the last six and a half years yields new insight into how government should not operate, another object lesson for future administrations. And one of those lessons of the Bush years is surely that potential disaster lurks behind what we had previously assumed to be a grand virtue: loyalty.
Read the rest to see why. Elsewhere on the site, Zack Pelta-Heller offers a Where Are They Now? round-up on five of the top GOP congressional losers of 2006, including Rick Santorum and George Allen. (Did you know that Santorum is planning a documentary and book that will "connect the dots" between Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela as foes of America?) And J. Lester Feder offers a brief dispatch from a particularly egregious pot-calling-kettle-black event at the Heritage Foundation.
--The Editors