L'Etat C'est la Maison Blanche

An excerpt from The Terror Presidency, former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith's tell-all about life inside the Bush administration:

[Dick Cheney's lawyer David] Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint. These men believed that the president would be best equipped to identify and defeat the uncertain, shifting, and lethal new enemy by eliminating all hurdles to the exercise of his power. They had no sense of trading constraint for power. It seemed never to occur to them that it might be possible to increase the president's strength and effectiveness by accepting small limits on his prerogatives in order to secure more significant support from Congress, the courts, or allies. They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch. When it came to terrorism, they viewed every encounter outside the innermost core of most trusted advisers as a zero-sum game that if they didn't win they would necessarily lose.

I love that phrase: "the enemies of America and the executive branch." Reminds me of a report filed by a cop sent to monitor Lenny Bruce's nightclub act: He said Bruce had mocked "religion, God, and the police in general."

[Via Justin Logan.]