From the Things That Befuddle Me Dept.:

1) When it comes to the acts of foreigners that use or fund terror, our Commander In Jest responds by claiming he couldn’t see it coming because of “an intelligence failure”, or - as with the UAE port contract - that he didn’t know about it in advance. Yet, in the first instance, the passage of time reveals numerous intelligence sources warned him of every adverse event. And in the second instance, his lack of prior knowledge is coupled with a never-used veto threat to anyone who dares oppose the thing he was supposedly unaware of.

And in another parallel to the second instance, he claimed torture was never officially sanctioned, yet threatened to veto bills put forth to renounce officially sanctioned torture.

2) With the FISA court system already a betrayal of the Constitution, it provides an eager, panting lapdog eagerly doing the bidding of the Commander In Jest as the fastest rubberstamp in US history. Yet Bush, offering no convincing evidence, claims he needs to bypass that system and the Constitution completely. And so afraid of being investigated and found guilty, he pulls out all of the lobbying stops to prevent such an investigation from taking place.

So if he succeeds, he’ll illegally obtain even more intelligence that he’ll continue to ignore. Which is just like having an Adolescent In Chief who selectively listens to what he wants to hear and denies being told anything else.

And when he says White House lawyers told him his illegal wiretap plan was perfectly legal, I have to wonder if they told him this AFTER his operation was discovered by the NY Times a year ago. And were the lawyers unanimous in that opinion, or is he selectively listening to one lawyer while the others object?

3) For years, we’ve heard the GOP opposing the appointment of activist judges. But the evidence indicates they oppose judicial activism that includes rulings they dislike, but they like activist judges who put forth rulings that support their ideological opinions.

But, taking no chances with jurists of either stripe, Bush now hands the power of the judicial branch to White House lawyers as the final arbiters, arguing that Congress handed him a blank check to go after Saddam with all means necessary, so he has the right to supercede the Judicial Branch and Constitution even long after Saddam’s been deposed.

And with that argument, he effectively negates both the Legislative and Judicial branches of government in perpetuity, achieving a record power grab that exceeds that of the Confederacy both in scope and in unconstitutionality. And by claiming ‘national security’ or ‘executive privilege’ or ‘lawyer-client confidentiality’ can thwart our capacity to even know if one or more lawyers ever said what he says they said or what arguments were used to support their quasi-judicial opinions.

4) And all this power rests now on one guy without majority support from most states in the country. Even if you account for a margin of polling error, only eight states would be split evenly and another half a dozen provide majority support for Bush. Thirty six states have a majority disapproving Bush’s performance now.

And the most notable places where he’s fallen furthest out of favor coincidentally were in swing states in 2004, some of which he won by comfortable margins, like Arkansas and Missouri. The most troubling of these is the one where he’s fallen the furthest, which was the state that won him the election in 2004, the state riddled with voting irregularities, as Glenn Greenwald notes:

Most revealing is Bush’s intense and pervasive unpopularity in Ohio, the state which swung the election in his favor. People in Ohio disapprove of Bush’s performance by an amazingly lopsided margin of 37-60%. Apparently, they’re not happy that they have no jobs, their kids have no health insurance, their neighbors have been stuck and are being killed in an increasingly unpopular, endless and senseless war in Iraq, and the President is surrounded by cronyism and corruption and thinks he has the power to break the law. But at least gay couples can’t get married, so that’s good.

While large numbers of Ohioans became convinced in 2004 that the all-consuming, paramount gay marriage issue compensated for all of the corruption and ineptitude of the Administration, it looks like they — along with the rest of the country — have changed their minds and have realized that this Presidency is a disaster for our country in every way that matters.

I question whether so many Ohioans have changed their minds in 15 months - an almost unheard of percentage change - or whether that vote was really rigged, with Ohio’s Secretary of State and vote machine manufacturers conspiring to thwart the majority. Further, by checking the tracking poll numbers for Ohio on that survey chart, the greatest drop in the percentage supporting Bush occurred in occasional churchgoers and people who call themselves ‘pro-life’, which flies in the face of the claim that ‘values voters’ decided that election (if so, are they saying now that people of faith who are anti-abortion have suddenly and inexplicably changed their values??!!??)

So much stretches credulity now, that the only way to find the truth requires extensive investigations, not more secrecy and coverups. And an overwhelming number of Americans now think Bush is acting illegally that a thorough investigation cannot be denied without great risk to the Congressional GOP members doing just that.

(And kudos to Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, John d’Amato and other bloggers trying to organize a populist resistance lobbying effort in key states those Congresspeople represent)

5) Jesus, speaking of investigating actions of the executive, who can deny that the longer a real investigation goes on, the more incredible things keep coming to light?

This investigation, into what I call an act of treason for its damage to our national security, has yielded so much unreal stuff that I fully expect Bush will be ten years gone from office before the depths of his underhandedness and law violations reaches public light. And the only thing opinion polls demonstrate to me now is that there’s still ten millions of Americans who’d rather stick to pathetic party partisanship than to know