Morning News

There's certainly alot of news this morning, beginning with the revelation that Cheney's notes on his copy of Joe Wilson's editorial in the NY Times on July 6, 2003 raise the issue of Wilson's wife sending him on the trip. Talking Points Memo has a copy of the notes.

If Rove is next, can Cheney be far behind? And, if Fitzgerald tries to indict Cheney, what do you suppose the government will do? Probably David Brooks has an answer.

In his column in today's NY Times (subscription wall), Brooks argues that the world is getting more confused and messier and that this calls for giving up freedom in favor of authoritarian government. Towards the end, it isn't an unreasonable inference from his argument to conclude that democracy is too messy a process for today's world. Perhaps we should just have a king.

A few snippets from his piece:

Times change. Now the chief problem is not sclerosis but disorder. The biggest threats come not from nanny states but from failed states and rogue states. There is less popular fear of bureaucrats possessing too much control than of ungoverned forces surging out of control: immigration, the federal debt, Iraqi sectarianism, Islamic radicalism, Chinese mercantilism, domestic rage and polarization.

...

The chief challenge these days is to restore legitimate centers of authority.

Middle-class suburbanites understood this shift far more quickly than the professional conservatives in Washington. What people wanted post-9/11 was Giuliani-ism on a global scale — someone who was assertive and decisive enough to assume authority and take situations that seemed ungovernable and make them governable.

...

A political age built around authority rather than freedom will elevate different sorts of disputes, of which the N.S.A. flap is only a precursor. Elections will revolve around the question: Who can best maintain order — in the home, neighborhood, culture and around the globe?

For a hundred years we debated the economic reach of the state, but that debate's basically done. The next one will be over where the state should erect guardrails in a mobile and fragmented world.

Notwithstanding the fact that he slams Bush in this piece, I find this kind of thinking a bit scary. It sounds very much like the rhetoric of the royalists in the eighteenth century. Democracy can't work because the world is too chaotic. We need a strong leader. We need someone endowed by God with his authority.

Come off it. We did away with that in 1776.

Then, of course, there's Frank Rich's great piece (also behind subscription wall), to which I had reference last night, saying if there's going to be a witch hunt for traitors, the search should begin in the White House.