Lessons learned

Who imagined at the end of the Vietnam War that thirty years later we would still be trying to learn its lessons. The Editor at 201K.com has distilled Vietnam's political legacy into this:

The lessons the rest of us learned from Watergate and Vietnam were about the failures of leadership. The lesson Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned was that if they'd been able to control the message they'd have gotten away with it.

Thirty years later the right controls the message, and Cheney and Rumsfeld can get away with anything. Anything. We're at the point where the New York Times won't tell its readers that the executive branch is spying on Americans without warrants. They held that news through his reelection, and only came clean when someone on their staff was about to tell the world that it was going on--and that the Times knew about it.

What's more, he evidently beat the New York Times to this conclusion.

We live in a nation ruled by an imperial presidency, led by a naked emperor.