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The ongoing effort by Republicans to rewrite the history of the Cold War is astonishing. Today's piece comes from conservative legal "scholar" John Yoo:

A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.

The emphasis is mine. The idiocy is his.

Why anyone would take legal advice from a man who doesn't even know his nation's most basic and most recent history is beyond me. And yet Yoo was the central figure in defining the legal rationale for this nation's national security policies following 9/11.