Salt Lake Tribune – Rosa Brooks: Did Bush fool us or did we fool ourselves? So why did it take us so long to notice? Someday, historians will ponder our strange collective passivity in the face of Bush-Cheney madness. Why did the editorial boards of our major newspapers either parrot the administration line or raise only muted criticism on so many issues, and for so long? Where were the tough journalistic questions? Why didn’t more members of Congress protest the administration’s blatantly unjustified policies and transparent constitutional outrages? For that matter, when Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft and countless…

Bush urges resolve on Iraq war – Los Angeles Times West Virginia is a once-reliably Democratic state that for the last two presidential elections has been central to Bush’s victories, and Wednesday marked the fourth Independence Day he has visited the state since taking office. But even here, where he won repeated rounds of applause in a gigantic hangar just completed for a new detachment of C-5 Galaxy cargo planes, there were hundreds of empty seats behind a towering American flag. Offering a history lesson on the 231st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, Bush…

Progressive Political News and Information: Nevada Thunder Frank Rich of the New York Times (paywall) “When The Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal” Even now, few have made the connection between this month’s Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules. Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order…