I’ve cast a cold eye on Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under W, before and I’m going to do it again. In the current Vanity Fair article on that debacle known as the Bush Presidency, Jack has this to say about how George and Dick Cheney seemed, well, different from the rest of us: “The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.”
Yes, it was “almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake”—not even “as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake”. But of course they were very interested—very, very interested— in expanding executive power for its own sake from the get-go, as they openly announced. But poor Jack can’t quite admit that his masters were as corrupt as they were.
