But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture that we ratified under President Reagan.”

Now, once you acknowledge that the CIA, at the direction of senior cabinet officials, violated international humanitarian law that requires the United States to prosecute the perpetrators, the only way to justify not investigating is to say that the executive branch of government is above the law — or, put more pragmatically, that it’s politically too messy to investigate senior leaders in the U.S. government.

Republicans didn’t hesitate to investigate when it involved Democratic President Bill Clinton, however, or to bring charges against him for lying about a personal matter. And Congress didn’t turn its backs on the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, which led to 14 senior officials charged with crimes, and 11 convictions. And of course the Watergate affair led to the indictment and conviction of senior Nixon administration officials, and impeachment charges against the president. Congressional investigations of sitting and past administrations are far from unprecedented.

So how does McCain explain why we ought to forget the whole torture problem — which led to the deaths of a still-unknown number of detainees in custody, some of whom the CIA still can’t account for — even as he acknowledges that it violated international treaties that legally obligate us to prosecute?

“I think these interrogations helped al-Qaeda recruit,” McCain said yesterday, adding: “the damage that it did to America’s reputation in the world we’re still on the way to repairing.”

Even setting aside the legal requirements, as a practical matter, a public acknowledgment and investigation would seem to be the only way to repair that damages.

As McCain put it: “This is an ideological struggle as well as a physical one.”

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“The whole Ronald Reagan ‘Thirteenth Commandment’ thing,” Sanford started to say. He corrected himself: “Errr — Eleventh Commandment. Whatever it was. Yeah, the Eleventh.”

As the conservatives around the table chuckled (with him, not at him), Sanford saved himself with a joke: “My wife gives me fifteen.”

Sam Alito — soft-spoken. John Roberts — affable and soft-spoken. Sanda Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, all of them, soft-spoken. This nominee’s more like Judge Bork. She has a temper. She has an attitude. She could come across as hubristic in the hearings, as arrogant. And so she could Bork herself. It’s very possible.

I asked Miranda about the basis of this theory after the luncheon. “I’ve read Jeff Rosen’s piece ["The Case Against Sotomayor"],” he said, “and that’s what I’m going on. I haven’t met the lady.” He added this to “what I’ve heard from practitioners on the second circuit, and they don’t like her” and wondered if the coming American Bar Association survey of lawyers’ opinions of Sotomayor could reflect all of this negative feedback.

“When that survey comes out, if it reflects Jeff Rosen’s article, it could be pretty explosive. I think she she might want to take the committee on, to engage, in a Bork-like fashion. The more recent two [nominees] have been very disciplined, more controlled.”

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The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

But that’s not what Gallup says.

Its April 24 poll has 56 percent saying the president is doing an “excellent or good job,” which is different than the generic approval number they used for previous presidents. Gallup’s separate current approval number for Obama is 65 percent. And The Times mysteriously lists the early events of the Clinton presidency while leaving out the huge poll boost Reagan got after surviving a March 30, 1981 assassination attempt. Reagan’s Gallup approval rating before the attack was only 59 percent, which the firm reported as historically low; at the 100 day mark, it was 67 percent. The Times doesn’t do any favors to its great reporters like Eli Lake by publishing this garbage.

The navy seals did exactly thr right thing in rescuing the american captain President obama did the right thing in allowing the navy to act

Why the passive voice? The president didn’t “allow” the Navy to act.

Here’s how The Associated Press reported it:

The Defense Department twice asked Obama for permission to use military force to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips from a lifeboat off the Somali coast. Obama first gave permission around 8 p.m. Friday, and upgraded it at 9:20 a.m. Saturday … White House officials on Sunday said Obama received regular updates by phone and in person at the White House — including 11 memos — and during his daily intelligence briefings with senior officials.

It’s really quite strange for Gingrich to deny the commander-in-chief credit for a successful mission that he ordered.

In 1984, Gingrich led the ad hoc American Opportunity Foundation, formed to give President Ronald Reagan credit for the invasion and rescue mission in Grenada. From The Washington Post’s story on this, which ran on October 4, 1984:

Gingrich’s American Opportunity Foundation has produced an ad that pictures blindfolded American hostages in Iran and an American student from Grenada kissing U.S. soil last year. “On Oct. 25, 1984,” it says, “America will debate the difference between bondage and freedom.”

Gingrich said the events would be “a nonprofit, educational experience.” He said that each selected campus would “invite . . . liberal Democrats to come and explain why they thought Iran was a more appropriate model than Grenada.“

“If it does help the president’s campaign, it does,” said foundation director Maura Gavigan.

Obviously, the Grenada invasion was a much larger mission, with casualties, but Gingrich didn’t say that Reagan deserved credit for “allowing” the military to win there.

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President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

“And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too.”

So said President-elect Barack Obama, in one of the most revealing sentences in his victory speech Tuesday. In his rejection of standard political divisions, his emphasis on “e pluribus unum,” and his gracious inclusion of those whose support he has “yet to earn,” we can find a clue to what makes our new president-elect so remarkable — perhaps even unique in the nation’s long history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Some public officials are minimalists. They do not like to reject the fundamental commitments of their fellow citizens. On environmental questions, sex equality, national security and economic policy, they try to bracket our deepest disagreements. They seek to obtain a consensus on what to do — not on why to do it.
Minimalists favor their approach because they think, as a pragmatic matter, it is most likely to work. They also insist that their approach, putting fundamental differences to one side, shows respect to their fellow citizens.

Political minimalism has a distinguished tradition in U.S. politics. In recent history, President George H.W. Bush stands as the leading minimalist. To the extent that Bush succeeded, especially in foreign affairs, it was because he enlisted diverse people, and diverse views, on behalf of the policies he chose.

Other public officials are visionaries. They have a large-scale vision about the direction in which the nation should go. They believe in big steps, not small ones.

Above all, these visionaries seek to alter the nation’s self-conception. In changing policy on the economy, or on national defense, they are entirely comfortable with asserting that their vision is the superior one and that alternative visions should be rejected. When they succeed, they transform how the nation understands itself.

Our greatest presidents — including Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — have been visionaries. In recent American history, President Ronald Reagan stands as the leading visionary.

Obama is something new in American politics — and not just for the obvious reasons. He is a visionary minimalist. This is a key both to his extraordinary campaign and to his unique promise. It even helps explain his conception of public service.

Obama’s minimalism lies in his consistent rejection of the standard social divisions — between red states and blue states, liberal and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As he said in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”

Ronald Reagan (Wikimedia)

Obama shows unfailing respect for those with competing views. In designing policies — on climate change, tax reform, energy conservation, foreign policy — he attempts to produce solutions that will accommodate, rather than repudiate, the defining commitments of his fellow citizens. Even on the most divisive issues of separation of church and state, Obama favors approaches that will attract support from all sides.

But Obama is a visionary too. Unlike most minimalists, he is willing to think big.

When he speaks of change, he means to include ambitious plans for energy independence, universal health care and educational reform. No less than Reagan, he wants to transform the nation’s self-understanding. He seeks not only to go beyond the divisions of the 1960s, but also to synthesize deeper strands in our history.

Thus Obama recognizes and celebrates the individualist strain in American culture. But he draws attention to a counterpoint — one that emphasizes mutual obligations.
As he said in 2004 and has often repeated since, “If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. . . . It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that makes this country work.”

With the election of a new president, I expect that we will soon enter a novel period of American life, in which a commitment to public service, sacrifice and a sense of mutual obligations will play a far larger role. That commitment will be anything but partisan. It will be felt in red states and blue states alike.

And it will be made possible, and fueled, by the visionary minimalism of America’s president-elect.

Cass R. Sunstein is Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. He will be the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor at University of Chicago Law School in January 2009. His most recent book, which he co-wrote with Richard Thaler, is “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” His books include “Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary” and “The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever.”

“At the pace things are going right now,” Obama told the crowd, “you’re going to have to ask whether you’re better off than you were four weeks ago!”

Obama went on to say that despite public anxiety, this is no time for fear or panic, and he seemed to plug his own capacity for providing “resolve and steady leadership.” (That line was met with brief chants of Obama.)  Within hours of the speech, the Obama campaign posted a clip of the speech on YouTube: