American media dares us not to think, not to care about the destruction of our most cherished political values

I confess I had recent revelations about the President having decided - against all possible reality - that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to "domestic military operations" and another memo linking this adminstration to torture and lawlessness in mind when I made this the quote of the day.

Instead of informing the American public that their president believes the Constitution gives him the authority to use the armed forces to violate the Constitutionally guaranteed liberties of US citizens - a vision that would be a nightmare to the framers of the Constitution - and that the abuses of Abu Ghraib that his administration tried to scapegoat on "a few bad apples" resulted directly from the pseudo-legal framework created by his authoritarian lawyers it is concerned with trivial nonsense and noise machine smears.

Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?