Please say "Stop It" in the comments here, if you are okay with the commenters over at WaPo showing much better judgment than its editorial writers. Being At One With Torture is okay today with Hiatt, and he's nudging the nomination of Mukasey as Attorney General along.

See, Congress can pass a law against torture (which WaPo theoretically opposes) ... and then of course the occupied White House and its cronies will naturally do their constitutional duty and enforce the law.

Doesn't that sound peachy keen?

Is there anyone still reading who doesn't already know that that hasn't happened with the existing laws Congress has passed, or with the Constitution? Why is Fred Hiatt insisting that the concept of this (forsworn) president's appointee's actually enforcing the laws is going to work this time when it hasn't previously?

IT IS EXTRAORDINARY that a man who rightly would have been confirmed with overwhelming support had he been President Bush's first nominee for attorney general may now be denied that post in the waning months of the administration. Just as extraordinary is Mr. Bush's campaign to salvage the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey. Yesterday, in a rare Oval Office meeting with reporters and later in a speech before the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Bush bemoaned the imperiled state of Mr. Mukasey's nomination without one iota of self-awareness that the nomination is in trouble because of the president's own warped policies on torture.

Mr. Mukasey is being judged not on his merits but as a proxy for Mr. Bush. Yet critics of the nomination, while understandably disturbed by Mr. Mukasey's unwillingness to label waterboarding illegal, may be working against the last, best hope to see the rule of law reemerge in this administration.

Mr. Mukasey's 172 pages of written responses to senators' questions leave no doubt that he is a staunchly conservative lawyer. He believes the Second Amendment bestows an individual right to bear arms. He recoils at the idea of appointing a special prosecutor when, in his words, the "members of the Department have the integrity and ability to discharge whatever responsibilities they may have." He embraces an expansive vision of presidential power that allows the president to ignore an "unconstitutional law" if it infringes on the powers of the executive.
(snip)
Those senators who truly want to bring the nation back from the disgrace of Mr. Bush's interrogation policies should do two things. They should confirm Mr. Mukasey, who is far more independent and qualified than either of Mr. Bush's previous two nominees. And they should do something which, for all the rhetoric, they have so far declined to do: ban torture, by passing the National Security with Justice Act sponsored by Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.). The act would limit all United States personnel -- military and civilian -- to using only interrogation techniques authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, which expressly prohibits waterboarding and which military leaders have said gives them the tools they need to get reliable information from difficult subjects. (Emphasis added.)

Charlie Brown kicks that football every season, and every single time Lucy pulls it away and he goes splat! on the ground, too. Fred Hiatt must be waiting for the cartoon to be drawn when Charlie Brown connects and a good solid kick sends the football sailing over the kite-eating tree.

Delusional is the only way to describe this kind of advice. Mystifying is the way I'd describe the judgement of that once excellent newspaper there in D.C., WaPo, to keep letting him drool his non sequiturs onto the editorial pages there.

Of course, since Mukasey has already said he considers the executive's powers to outweigh laws passed by Congress, there is no basis whatsoever to reason that the WaPo proposal will work.

This time I won't put up the excellent comments appended to the editorial, but again the commenters show superior judgment, intellect and political acuity to that of the editors.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com )