Dowd: GOP Has Short Memory

As their party contracts with the defection of Arlen Specter, the GOP is complaining about a disappearing balance of power: “How quaint,” writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times—this from the party whose “arrogant” previous administration “did its best to undermine checks and balances.” Meanwhile, the current “professor in chief” is playing constitutional scholar, assuring us he won’t run things like “the Boy Emperor and his regents.”

One of those regents this week faced a challenge from a student at Stanford, where Condoleezza Rice is planning to return as a professor. The student asked if waterboarding was torture, and Rice’s response—“if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture”—was “almost quoting Nixon’s logic,” Dowd notes: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

(More Maureen Dowd stories.)