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Something happened seventy-three years ago today — one of those milestones that’s immediately recognized as an historic event, but whose real significance is not understood until years later.

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, someone set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin, where the German parliament met.

There is a popular myth about the Reichstag fire which is almost certainly untrue: that the Nazis themselves set the fire to clear the path for a Hitler dictatorship. In fact, a mentally disturbed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe probably set the fire, acting on his own. But the Nazis saw the fire as a great opportunity. Using emergency powers, they banned the Communist party, revoked civil liberties and gave Hitler the authority to rule by decree. Once he had that power, he never gave it up. The emergency never ended.

When a court acquitted several Communist party leaders of a role in the fire, Hitler stripped the courts of much of their authority and established a special tribunal called the Volksgerichtshof to handle “political crimes.”

George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we all saw historic parallels to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly sixty years earlier. Now, in hindsight, and having witnessed four and a half years of the Bush Administration’s response to those attacks, I think there are lessons to be learned from a different historical parallel.

Don’t forget Pearl Harbor, but do remember the Reichstag fire.

First, I got an email message referring me to this CNN story:

The second in command at the Pentagon said Thursday that people who publicly oppose allowing a Middle Eastern company to take over management of some U.S. ports could be threatening national security.

I shrugged it off. The Bush Administration says stuff like this all the time. In this business, you get a lot of wacky leads. Then came the second email. What it contained was dynamite: a template file that the Administration uses for press releases.

[fill in administration authority name] said on [date of announcement] that people who publicly oppose [fill in administration policy] could be threatening national security.

If my source was right, this meant that a collection of Microsoft Office macros was running the government now. Poorly-coded macros. That would explain a lot of things.

I’ve decided not to reveal the name of the source. It’s much more dramatic that way.

If the source works for the federal government, then this blog post is investigative journalism, and I should be getting packed for prison right now. If not, then this whole story is nothing more than incisive political commentary, and my source and I should expect audits of our income tax returns.

Boy. Investigative journalism sure is exciting.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn’t make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn’t endanger national security. But that’s nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation’s ports.

…

Let’s go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. “Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],” read an aide’s handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. “Hard to get a good case,” the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity … he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn’t.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what’s the difference?

Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that “people don’t need to worry about security.”…

…

[A]fter years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn’t attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can’t suddenly turn around and say, “But these are good Arabs.”

…

But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush’s current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions — a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.

Howard Fineman, on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, on the White House claim that George W. Bush didn’t know about the port management deal until he heard about it from the media:

I think the president has a lot of credibility when he pleads ignorance.

Olbermann, filling in some historical background about relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Osama bin Laden:

Back in February 1999, the CIA had a chance to take out bin Laden at a hunting camp in Afghanistan, but one of the reasons it did not, said [former CIA director George] Tenet, was because bin Laden was visiting with the emiratic princes. To quote Tenet, “You might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I’m sure entered into everybody’s calculations.”

Now I see why Bush wants these guys running our ports. Why, they’re in a perfect position to know bin Laden’s plans. And surely they’ll clue us in just as soon as they can.

Cartoons have been causing such a lot of trouble in recent weeks. Tom Tomorrow confronts the issues.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore has an animated gun safety lesson from Dick Cheney.

Ward Sutton has the vice-president’s official timeline of Quailgate.

Sutton also brings us the Republican Funeral Patrol:

Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Paul Wellstone… it disgraces their memory to speak passionately of their beliefs at their funerals.

Remember when cartoons didn’t make you want to cry?

Come to think of it, I don’t think it’s the cartoons doing that.

The veto is one of the president’s most important powers. Unlike wiretapping without a warrant or indefinite detention without charges or trial, this power is actually given to the president by the U.S. Constitution.

George W. Bush is the first president since James A. Garfield never to use the veto. (Garfield was shot a few months after taking office.)

Bush has threatened to use the veto a few times, and it’s instructive to see what issues stir him up enough to reach for the veto pen.

For example, he threatened to veto any law that included the anti-torture language put forth by John McCain, a Republican senator who knew something about torture because he had been a POW in the Vietnam War. After McCain’s language was approved by about 90 percent of both houses of Congress — enough to override a veto — Bush signed it into law, tacking on a “signing statement” that said essentially that he didn’t have to obey the law if he didn’t feel like it.

And now he’s threatening to veto any attempt by Congress to block the turnover of operations of six eastern U.S. ports to a company owned by the government of Dubai. His Treasury Secretary, John Snow, who had business dealings with the company before joining the administration, had a duty to review the deal, but says he first learned of it “by reading it in the newspapers.”

The White House is accusing its critics of bigotry. Dubai has been an ally in the current fight against terrorist groups. Press Secretary Scott McClellan says “We shouldn’t be holding a Middle Eastern company to a different standard” than companies from other parts of the world.

It that true?

Just a few weeks ago, twenty-three al Qaeda prisoners escaped from a prison in Yemen. Yemen, like Dubai, is an ally in the anti-terrorist fight. It is believed the escapees had inside help. Do you suppose they would have found enough sympathetic insiders to escape from a prison in some other part of the world?

Am I suggesting that Middle Eastern people are inherently untrustworthy? Not at all.

Listen: during the 1960s, in some parts of the United States, the men who bombed a Birmingham, Alabama church and killed four little girls were treated like heroes. In the 1990s, some Americans wanted to help fugitive Eric Rudolph, who killed and injured people in a series of bombings, including one at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

If people like that were considered heroes by some Americans, would it be surprising to learn that some otherwise upstanding citizens of Dubai, from all walks of life, secretly feel sympathy for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda? It would be disappointing if a quiet al Qaeda sympathizer with inside knowledge of U.S. port operations used that knowledge to help jihadists smuggle people or material into the United States, but would it be surprising?

Well, terrorism has been good for George W. Bush. I suppose another attack would help his approval ratings, which have been down in the dumps.

Sarah Vowell on The Daily Show:

The thing about the current president is — I wrote about this a little bit — how he keeps opening up new possibilities for us. You know, like I talk about going to his inauguration and standing there and crying when he took the oath, ’cause I was so afraid that he would wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water. The failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.

If you want to smother a democracy, you’re going to want to work in the dark:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

…

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war.…

…

[A research group at George Washington University] plans to post Mr. Aid’s reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

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But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

…

“I think this is a travesty,” said Dr. [Anna K.] Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. “I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts.”

Of course, the Bush Administration believes facts are implicated with reality in a conspiracy to undermine the Administration’s authority. From a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Remember, folks: Bush, Cheney and Company aren’t liars, because truth is an illusion.

If you are a real defender of free speech, sometimes you will feel the little hairs standing up on the back of your neck. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect anyone if it doesn’t protect the people you’d most like to shut up. It doesn’t protect any ideas unless it protects the ideas you most wish to stifle.

If this guy doesn’t have freedom of speech, then no one does.

Seventy years ago, the world watched a modern, civilized nation slowly spiraling into madness.

When people were arrested without charges and held without a trial and without a chance to defend themselves, the world said, “These are trying times, and no one should be surprised at some excesses.” When laws were passed stripping certain citizens of most of their rights, the world said, “These things happen. At least it’s not everyone.” When the government turned a blind eye to riot and murder, the world said, “The German people have a proud heritage. Soon they will stand up to set things right.”

How did that all work out?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We’re in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

…

Mr. Arar’s case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria’s torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He’s never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that “accidents will happen” in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar’s behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn’t matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar’s lawsuit last Thursday.…

[Judge Trager] said that “the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted.”

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

…

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what’s not O.K.?

History repeats itself. This modern, civilized nation is slowly spiraling into madness. It’s time, right now, for the American people to stand up and set things right.

A few years ago I was being shown around some of the ritzier neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I saw a fancy sports car just ahead of us, with a vanity license plate that said, “MENSCH.”

“I know one thing about the guy in that car,” I said. “He’s no mensch.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the mensch gap:

“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren’t mensches.

Dick Cheney isn’t a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney’s recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion’s aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about “unknown unknowns” and going to war with “the army you have…”

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn’t a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans?…

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn’t a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan’s catastrophic start doesn’t reflect poorly on his department, that “no logical person” would have expected “a transition happening that is so large without some problems.” In fact, Medicare’s 1966 startup went very smoothly.…

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

…

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders’ character, it has horrifying consequences. You can’t learn from mistakes if you won’t admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

During the campaign of 2004, I heard people complain that John Kerry was too smart; that he knew foreign languages; that he had traveled to many countries. One person said, “He thinks he’s better than us.”

Bush doesn’t?

Kerry showed he had the intellect for the job, and some Americans saw a threat to the idea that “all men are created equal,” I guess.

Personally, I want somebody way smarter than me as president, but many American voters seem uncomfortable with a president who’s too smart, so we get the fake down-home Texas boy, George W. Bush, and his team of Washington Blame-Dodgers.

Oy vey.

Poor Mr. Cheney is such a delicate flower:

Harry Whittington said Friday he was sorry for what Dick Cheney and his family have “had to go through” after the vice president shot him in a weekend hunting accident.

In other news, Republicans are demanding that Roman Polanski apologize to Charles Manson for the trauma Manson must have suffered after ordering the killings of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and four others at Polanski’s home. “Manson has suffered for years over this. Polanski publicly displayed almost crippling grief over the deaths of his wife and friends, but he has never shown one bit of remorse for Charlie’s suffering,” a GOP spokesman said, wiping a tear from his eye. “I — I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”

“We all assume certain risks in whatever we do,” Whittington said. “Whatever activities we pursue and regardless of how experienced, careful and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen.”

When we’re not careful, they happen more often. And the really big accidents seem to cluster around Cheney, Bush and Company. They’re just unlucky, I guess.

Bumper stickers may be our culture’s greatest repository of wisdom. I just got back from a long walk, where I saw this:

Your Silence Won’t Save You

A thought worth remembering.

No more Danish pastries in Iran:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed.”

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners’ union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

Isn’t that silly? The Iranians are throwing any concept of common sense out the window, and letting the overheated emotions of the moment lead them to make fools of themselves. What’s with those people, anyway? Where do they get these ridiculous ideas?

They’re all governed by emotion over there, you know. Not like us Americans. We’re rational. Our actions are guided by facts and logic. You know, if Denmark did something to offend us, we’d deal with our differences like grown-ups, and go right on eating those delicious Danish pastries. If the Belgians offended us, we’d arrange a breakfast meeting and work things out quickly and sensibly, perhaps over some Belgian waffles. If the French offended us, uh…

You know, uh… maybe this is a positive sign. Yeah. The Iranians are following the American example. That’s right — democracy is taking root! Yeah!

Sigh…

Dick Cheney’s gunshot victim has taken a turn for the worse:

The man shot by Vice President Dick Cheney suffered a minor heart attack after birdshot moved into his heart, hospital officials said today, and was moved back to the intensive care unit for further treatment.

Texas attorney Harry Whittington was recovering and will be monitored for seven days to make sure more bird shot doesn’t move to other organs or move to other part of his body, hospital officials said.

Unless Whittington recovers fully, we’re going to feel very bad about all the jokes that have been made about his shooting.