The worst possible reason

I've been tut-tutting about the current fad of Nixon-Bush comparisons. So just to put a different spin on things, here's a Clinton-Bush comparison. First, some background:

At last week's Drinking Liberally get-together, we were putting our collective gray matter together in pursuit of an answer to this puzzler:

Even for five pub-tables' worth of liberals (or some leftish approximation), it seemed impossible that Bush & Co really believe that their excursions into torture, secret gulags, warrantless wiretaps, and the rest, are legal.

It's not merely illegal, but pointless from a practical point of view: The evidence is overwhelming that torture is useless, unless you want to extract unreliable information, motivate your enemies, and place your own troops in greater risk. The law is clear that the NSA can engage in wire-tapping of communications between Americans and terror suspects for up to 3 days before a warrant is needed--and the secret court that grants the warrants has only denied a fraction of a percent of those requested.

So why do it? Why, in fact, go out of your way to do it?

Let's time-warp to 2004, when Bill Clinton took this look back at l'affaire Lewinski:

I think I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could. I think that's the most , just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could ... I've thought about it a lot. And there are lots of more sophisticated explanations, more complicated psychological explanations. But none of them are an excuse...

Since he didn't then disembowel himself on live television for the amusement of his political enemies, most Clinton-haters simply wrote his statement off as insufficient, as more Slick Williery, without considering just how telling--dare one say "honest?"--his explanation really was.

"Just because I could."

Clinton didn't mean, trivially, "I did it because I wanted to." He meant, "I did it because I had the power, and what good is power if you don't push it to its limits?"

A law that declares that the President may do X will never be to the satisfaction of Cheney, Bush, et al., simply because this implies the theoretical possibility that the law might say he may not do X, or Y--and that possibility, however theoretical, is unacceptable to these people. The arrogance that has always been a Bush character trait --now freed from the need to dissemble to gain re-election and encouraged by the cabal of conspirators around him--has been elevated to a governing principle.

Why is Bush insisting on the prerogative to torture, to wiretap anyone whenever the notion strikes? For the worst possible reason: Just because he can. Just to demonstrate that he really is beyond the reach of mere federal law.

If I'm right, there'll be an easy way to tell: It won't stop. He'll continue to stage demonstrations that the law doesn't apply to him, not because whatever act he wants to commit (torture, wiretapping, gulags, etc. are only the beginning, if I'm right) matters much in itself, but because he wants to establish the principle that he and his circle are a law unto themselves.

It's a well-worn trope that power can get to the best of us by bringing out the worst of us. With Clinton, the dark perk of power was about sex. With Bush, it's about an angry, resentful man who sees a way to settle the score, once and for all, with anyone who ever dared suggest he didn't measure up.