NP: Outkast, Speakerboxxx

I'm not saying that it's not worth a righteously indignant special comment, but I thought it was obvious that a lot of the legal wrangling around torture was specifically designed to absolve the administration from blame and criminal prosecution? Wasn't that self-evident? Ever since Abu Ghraib, the name of the game has been insulating the upper echelons from looking like war criminals. Or did it take the retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies to make people sit up and notice the methodology and the objective?

The more interesting part is that Levin was apparently forced to resign in 2004, ahead of the other U.S. Attorney firings. Now, those firings were much higher profile. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if those higher-profile firings were meant to obscure the lower-profile firing of an assistant U.S. Attorney.

Of course, the reason the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that is that it's essentially the first part of the plot of the X-Files movie, with Levin playing the role of the FEMA office in the government building that got blow'd up right in the beginning.

That's right. Dick Cheney isn't Darth Vader, he's the Cigarette Smoking Man. The truth is out there.