Being caught in lies didn't hurt Bush one bit.
He was, along with his despicable v.p., the most impeachable s.o.b. in the history of the USA. And nothing happened.

I give Bush the "credit" for setting the precedent and to Obama for following in his footsteps. I will concede that Obama has refined the deception and the trance, but the process is all Bush imo.

Yes, it could be a lot, lot worse.....That is what the Republican primaries have showed us this year.

The Green Party candidate will not win.  Voting for the Green Party at best makes you irrelevant--at worst it plays into Rove's hands.

Defeating Obama will not teach the Democrats a lesson--it would bring to power the most conservative version of Republicans in 50 years......

It was the best line of the movie.

McCain's aide was talking about Dick Cheney calling McCain's picking Palin a "reckless choice."

Hair-splitting aside, you always know you're in a field when the argument begins "some have argued." Either way, this is thin. Holder is basically asserting that due process is what we say it is, but we'll decline to tell you what -- specifically -- "it" is.
[snip]
...we're being asked to take the wisdom of the president and his national security apparatus for granted.

That's a precedent that the Bush administration set in the bad old days of Attorney General John Ashcroft. It was this Department of Justice that produced John Yoo's legal memos

Coates concludes with "The point is, absent any actual information, we are left with 'trust us.'" instead of 'justice', and asks...

...even if you trust Barack Obama with this power--and you should not--why would trust anyone after him? Why would you trust Rick Santorum with power to kill people without anyone, anywhere, at any time?

It seems that Due Process is political justification process, as opposed to Judicial Process being process under and defined by law.

Since Bush set the precedent, Obama and his defenders expect everyone to be just fine with him building and expanding on Bush's precedent?

making himself scarce for the good of the Republican party

in the latter scene, Wallace confesses to Schmidt that she could not bring herself to vote - she doesn't need to say why, & Schmidt wordlessly understands

immediately afterward, in the scene with McCain, an abashed, desolate Schmidt has just offered an elliptical apology for not handling "her" more skillfully, & it's then that McCain says he lost the election for other reasons - & that is surely the truth, but the grammar of the film, thanks especially to the preceding scene between Schmidt & Wallace, presents McCain's words in this scene as hardly more than bromides meant to console Schmidt, & this is one reason why i said that the film is biased

[I originally wrote this comment, reproduced here edited to remove slurs on Palin, before the movie aired.  Having seen the movie now, I agree.  Moore disappeared and it was all Palin.  That the portrait was, um, unflattering at best should tell us all we need to know.]

If that's the case, I'd think it fair to say that, to the degree it "humanizes" Palin, it only makes more clear what a worthless POS McSame would have been as a President, and just how bad his judgment was and remains.  Losing the race and knowing he would lose, he chose her and foisted her on 'murca in a desperate gamble.  That he lost the election is something he can exercise gratitude over, because I remain convinced of my opinion - formed back then and unchanged since - that her lust for power was such that she would have gone all Lucrezia Borgia on McCain once in office and by now he'd be dead or incapacitated and she'd be President.

I remain of the further opinion that McSame's electoral defeat was sealed once the initial buzz wore off and people got to see what kind of ####### ### ### Palin was/is, when the Katie Couric interview came out showing Palin to be an idiot and, most definitively, when he "had" to suspend his campaign to come to DC in the face of the break in the economy (i.e., someone looting the Fed) and then proceeded to sit in the meeting like the proverbial bump on a log, making Bush look both intelligent and articulate.

That we still have Palin in our discourse now shows us two things:  (1) sometimes it takes a while for History to be ready to show us disaster averted and just how close it came and (2) she and her supporters (most particularly those remoras who stand to benefit financially from her in public life) are effective in getting out there and hustling up some attention and cash.

. . . how close we came to a national disaster and how terrifying it would have been if John McCain's ploy worked and he had won the election.

I also had read that sentence as suggesting  causation but now can see the structural problem/ambiguity in that sentence.

I TIVO'd the movie to watch later, depending upon commentary here and elsewhere.  And other reviews also have pointed out that there were other and probably larger factors in McCain's loss -- as apparently is made more clear in the book, so this also is a result of the common structural problem in making a movie from only part of a book.

I think about that every damn time I have to traipse from one side of a department store all the way across to the other side just to go up another level on the escalator.