There is considerable complaining these days from the usual source — Congress — that the Justice Department is “broken” and simply cannot function under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. This is the same source that tells us just about everything else is “broken,” from our strongest-on-earth military to health care to the world’s climate. Saying these things are “broken” is a way of proposing that a cure is needed, a proposal inevitably made without telling us, in specifics, what’s wrong, what Congress would do to improve it, or, most importantly, how much the fix would cost and who will foot the bill. Perhaps “broken” has become such […]

Much has been made of President Bush’s supposedly wanting a “blank check” to conduct the war in Iraq. One need not be overly enthusiastic about how the war has gone in order to observe that, for whatever else might be said of it, a “blank check” is not and has never been what the President has sought. Instead, he repeatedly (and perhaps unwisely) went to the United Nations to ask for escalating sanctions on Iraq. He got them, usually by unanimous or nearly unanimous votes of the Security Council. When all-too-predictably they failed to stop either Saddam’s aggressiveness or his innumerable violations of […]