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It's official. According to the American people, there's never been anyone worse.

Yet another way Bush is going to be remembered as worse than Carter and Nixon. Gallup:

President George W. Bush's job approval rating has dropped to 28%, the lowest of his administration. Bush's approval is lower than that of any president since World War II, with the exceptions of Jimmy Carter (who had a low point of 28% in 1979), and Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who suffered ratings in the low- to mid-20% range in the last years of their administrations....

Bush's current 28% job approval rating is at the very low end of the spectrum of approval ratings Gallup has recorded across the 11 presidents in office since World War II. The average presidential job approval rating during that time has been 55%. The highest reading, as noted, is the 90% for the current President Bush in September 2001; the lowest is the 22% for Truman in February 1952.

Only three presidents in Gallup's history have received job approval ratings of 28% or lower:

Carter's low point of 28% was measured in late June and early July 1979, as the country underwent significant gas shortages and amid perceptions of a failing economy.
Nixon had a number of readings below 28% in 1973 and 1974 prior to his leaving office as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Truman recorded a number of readings below 28% in 1951 and 1952 as his administration was beset, similar to the current situation for Bush, with problems relating to the economy and an unpopular war (in Korea).

Of note is the fact that George W. Bush has now descended below the low point of his father's (George H.W. Bush's) administration. The senior Bush had a reading of 29% in July and August 1992. The former president also recorded a high point of 89%, the highest on record until his son's 90% in September 2001. Both Bushes, in short, have undergone radical 60-point drops in job approval in the course of their administrations.

Presidents who receive job approval ratings in the 20% range are generally beset by economic concerns, wars, or scandals. Truman, who has the dubious distinction of obtaining the lowest job approval rating in Gallup Poll history, had the triple whammy of a bad economy, an unpopular war, and hints of scandal in the last years of his administration. Nixon, of course, was primarily laid low by Watergate, although he had been the steward of an unpopular war for most of the years after he took office in January 1969. Carter was in the middle of a bad economy and sharply rising gas prices when he suffered a 28% job approval rating in the summer of 1979.

Now, Bush, the current president, has obtained a 28% job approval rating at a time when Americans are extraordinarily worried about the economy, when gas prices have risen to historical high points, in the middle of a war that the majority of Americans say was a mistake, and at a time when only 15% of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States.

He always wanted to outdo his daddy, didn't he? Guess its Mission Accomplished on that one!

In his testimony before Congress during investigations into what is now called the Iran-Contra Affair, Vice Admiral John Poindexter stated: "I made a deliberate decision not to ask the President, so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked out."

As I read this AP follow-on to ABC News' story on the creation of the Bush Administration's torture regime, that phrase sprang immediately to mind:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

There's only one problem with plausible deniability: if you're going to set it up, you better make sure that the president knows how to play along. ABC:

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

... In his interview with ABC News, Bush said the ABC report about the Principals' involvement was not so "startling." The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before Wednesday's report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed.

Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.

In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: "It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States."

... In the interview with ABC News Friday, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM.

"We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew."

The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."

Here's the thing that no one in the administration seems to understand: the law isn't simply what the president says it is, nor is it simply whatever the Attorney General declares. It exists independent of their actions and declarations. And it does not matter how evil the president or his advisors believe their suspect to be, because unless the law specifically includes an explicit exception for "evildoers," the law still applies to them.

The President and his team may not understand this, but the people in the CIA surely do.

"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved. "These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it's legal, [you should] just tell them to implement it."

The CIA knew what they were doing was questionable at best, and they returned time and time again to the highest levels of our government to get it in writing before they acted. They knew this program would eventually come back to haunt them, and this time they weren't willing to take the fall. This time they wanted proof that their interrogation programs had been explicitly and repeatedly approved by the president's most senior advisors. And this time they're going to leak to whomever necessary to make sure that they aren't made to take the fall.

And here's one really amazing fact. Of all of the people in the White House, only John Ashcroft seemed to have some idea of just how wrong things had gone:

Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.

At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.

A year later, amid the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects that was leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

Were this happening in any other nation on Earth, our entire political and media establishment would be up in arms. Imagine for a moment what would happen if we learned that the Chinese had a program such as this. Or the French. Or the Russians.

Or forget your imagination. Go study history. Learn about the way the KGB used torture to coerce confessions out of individuals deemed enemies of the state. Learn about how the Nazis developed enhanced interrogation techniques - the exact translation of their words that we are ourselves using today - to protect the German homeland. Ask sen. John McCain about the use of water-boarding under the regime of Pol Pot. Do you honestly think that each of those regimes didn't each believe they were in the right? Do you not think that each constructed elaborate legal justifications for their actions? Do you not think that each argued that the magnitude of the threat they faced justified their actions?

What we are doing is no different. It is in every way precisely the same. For the illusion of security, we have abandoned some of our earliest and most cherished principles.

Under George Washington, the first American Army was explicitly ordered not to follow British example of torturing prisoners of war. Instead, Washington ordered that prisoners be treated "with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren." If we were to be the army of freedom and liberty, Washington understood, we must be so in every way.

In keeping with this tradition, President Lincoln, a man with whom Bush loves to compare himself, instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Called the Lieber Code, it was the first time in human history that the laws of war had been explicitly codified, and it included explicit prohibitions of torture in any and all circumstances.

Lincoln's orders soon became the model on which the entire world based their laws of war, eventually leading to the creation of the now-famous Geneva Convention of 1929. Although the US didn't sign the Convention until 1955, both Gens. Eisenhower and McArthur order it be carefully observed throughout all of WWII and the Korean War. And although the Convention did not require it, during the Vietnam War we once again extended its protection to our enemies in the Viet Cong.

That has been our tradition. From the war that gave birth to this nation until the Bush Administration, we have stood opposed to this sort of behavior. Whether most civilians realized it or not, opposition to torture has always been at the very center of the military code of conduct of our nation during both times of peace and war.

For the illusion of security, our leaders have thrown that entire history away. Rather than defend our ideals they chose instead to destroy them. And the worst part is, with the exception of John Ashcroft - John Ashcroft?!?! - none of them seem to realize or care.

This is not who we are. This is not the best we can do. We have always been better than this. Until now...

They offered the president plausible deniability, but he's apparently decided to turn it down. I don't even know what to say:

"Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And, yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

More analysis, this time from Wired's security blog Threat Level

Citing cases that prevented companies from suing the U.S. government for losses they sustained overseas during wartime, You writes "These cases and the untenable consequences for the President's conduct of a war that would result from the application of the Due Process Cluse demonstrate its inapplicability during wartime--whether to the conduct of interrogations or the detention of enemy aliens."

Lest it not be clear enough that Yoo is arguing the President is King in wartime, thanks to the Constitution's Article II powers, two footnotes surrounding the former sentence make it clear.

In footnote 10, Yoo writes "our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations."

Remember that Bush said the wiretapping program was part of his war on terrorism.
And there it is. In the war on terrorism, the bill of rights does not apply.

Footnote 11 adds to it: "We conclude that the restrictions outlined in the Fifth Amendment simply do not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation's enemies."

As Threat Level then goes on to point on, Yoo now teaches constitutional law at UC-Berkeley.

This really is quite simple. The Constitution of the United States was a document that was created and ratified in 1787, just four short years after the completion of the Revolutionary War. That war, one in which all of the men who wrote the constitution committed treason and therefore risked their lives, was sparked by a series of abuses of power by King George, many of which came either during or after British participation in the French-Indian War, and most of which are set out in detail in the Declaration of Independence. So if there is anything the men who wrote our constitution understood, it was the nature of governmental power during a time of war.

During the debate over ratification, one issue dominated like no other. And as most people who have completed a basic high school civics or history class can tell you, that issue was how to best limit the power of the federal government, and more specifically, how best to limit the power of the presidency. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, the bicameral legislature, the Electoral College - all of it was done, at least in part if not in whole, to protect the rights of the individual against inevitable encroachment by the state. Both despite and because of their recent experiences with governmental abuse of power during a time of war, they did everything they possibly could to limit the power of the state.

Now I can already hear the critics firing up their emails in response: what about all of those pro-federalist arguments made by Hamilton? Surely those count for something? To which I would respond: yes, of course they do. But let's be clear about this. All three - even Hamilton! - went to great pains to make explicit the wide variety of ways presidential power was contained even in a time of war. Here, for example, is what Hamilton himself wrote in Federalist 69:

The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

Could that possibly be any more clear? Yoo explicitly argues in his memo that congress has no role during a time of war. But even Hamilton knew otherwise. Even Hamilton, a man many claimed wished he could be king, recognized the limited nature of presidential power under the new constitution. Yoo, it would appear, is completely unaware of this very basic historical fact.

Now in the end, as we all know, the arguments in the Federalist won the day and the constitution was ratified. But that victory did not come without compromise. There were of course many of them along the way, but none were more famous or important than the compromise that led to the Bill of Rights. Although Madison initially vehemently opposed the Amendments, he did so because he believed they were unnecessary. The constitution, he argued, granted the government a very limited set of powers. Unless a power was explicitly granted, it did not exist. Therefore, as just one example in his early opposition to the Bill of Rights, he argued that an amendment protecting freedom of speech was unnecessary because nothing in the constitution granted the federal government the power to regulate speech. The constitution, Madison argued, meant precisely what it said but no more.

Eventually, however, Madison's textual arguments gave way to much more pragmatic ones. By the time of the New York and Virginia conventions, he recognized that unless he and his fellow Federalists promised a series of amendments to protect essential liberties, his fight for ratification would fail. And it was that recognition that led him not only to give way on the issue of amendments, but to personally spearhead the fight for ratification during the 1st Congress in 1789.

Now to repeat: All of this was done in the shadow of war. War had just been completed, and many, most notably Hamilton, believed that was was soon to come. And here is the essential point: it was not simply despite concerns of war that the constitution and Bill of Rights passed. It was because of them. To the men who created and signed this document it could not possibly have been more clear: it was during a time of war that basic liberties most needed protection. King George's worst abuses of power had coming not during peace but during war. This was a fundamental, inescapable truth which quite literally all of them had just lived.

Despite yet all of this, Yoo wants to argue that the men who wrote the constitution and the Bill of Rights intended for them to give way to unchecked and unlimited presidential authority during a time of war? Really? Really?

Two questions.

One: If this really was their intention, why didn't they write this into the constitution? There are no emergency war powers in the constitution. There are no provisions for its suspension, nor for the suspension of the rights protected in the various amendments. If this is what the Framers intended, why didn't they write it down?

Two: If executive power truly was intended to be unlimited during a time of war, how do we explain the Third Amendment?

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Yoo's reading of the constitution doesn't merely suggest that the president can ignore the Third Amendment, it demands it. But to do so implies that the Third Amendment literally does not mean what it actually says. How would Yoo explain this? If presidential power during war was to be unlimited, why does this Amendment explicitly say that when it comes to Quartering, even during a time of war the president must only act in a manner prescribed by law?

Laws, you might recall, are - at least according to out constitution - written and passed by the Congress, and not the Executive.

How would Yoo explain this? How?

UPDATE: Good to see that the AP has picked this up:

For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism. That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,'' the footnote states, referring to a document titled ''Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.''

Remember that for the Colonists, and thus for the men who wrote the constitution, many of the abuses that spurred the creation of the Fourth Amendment came during the either the Revolutionary or French-Indian Wars. The Fourth Amendment was created in part to protect people from their government during a time of war.

And please, none of this "Sept 11" changed everything nonsense. Either the constitution means what it plainly says or it means nothing. We can't simply wish away the Bill of Rights because we are scared. If the world has changed such that the Amendment is a luxury we cannot afford, we can repeal it. But we cannot simply ignore it. It exists. That fact has consequences, and one of them is that we, the people, are to be safe "in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

An exemption in the constitution for "domestic military operations?" Really? Where? And more to the point, why? What part of early American history would have led the men who created this Amendment to intend that? In 1791, how many Americans had "houses, papers, and effects" that were anywhere other than inside the United States? And assuming that there were any, how would the US government extended its reach to search them?

This whole thing quite literally makes no sense. None.

Publius:

The national administrative state wasn't a tyranny forced upon the public - it was a response to the needs of an urban, industrialized country of strangers.

More specifically, it was a direct response to a massive increase in the complexity of daily life in the early part of the 20th century. In the span of about 2 decades, America went from a nation based on a disparate network of tightly knit rural communities to a highly concentrated network of impersonal urban ones. People couldn't rely on their personal connections to manage their daily lives anymore, so a new system - the administrative state - was developed to take its place. When the Great Depression painfully exposed how underdeveloped that state was, it was once again expanded, with the Social Security system being one of the most important and long-lasting results.

The administrative state was not something that was forced on us from some outside force. It was something we Americans chose to develop in response to dramatic new challenges and problems. Government may not always be the solution to our problems, but it isn't necessarily the problem either.

I got a late start on my real work today, so blogging has suffered. Here are some things I would have written at length about if I had time...

+ Sometime later today, the portion of the Iraq War widget over on the right tracking U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq will scroll past the 4,000 mark. 900 of them have come since the start of The Surge, and 97% of those casualties have come since our president declared "Mission Accomplished."

+ John Yoo, one of the brilliant legal minds behind the "its legal if the president says or does it" theory of executive power, took to the pages of the WSJ today to decry the undemocratic nature of the Democratic Party's primary process. His primary argument?

This delegate dissonance wasn't anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature.

He really couldn't have gotten this any more wrong if he tried. Has he ever heard of the Electoral College? Does he not know anything about the series of events that prompted the passage of the 12th Amendment. And what about the 17th Amendment? The Framers did everything possible to avoid creating a system of direct presidential election, and they were so successful that we still live with that system today.

I don't know what is worse: That Yoo was stupid enough to write this nonsense, or that the Wall St. Journal published it.

+ Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) announced on Bill Maher's show that he intends to introduce the 'Make Room for Serious Criminals' bill. Its purpose? To begin to end our ridiculous war on drugs by decriminalizing marijuana.

+ Ezra is right: if you are eating cheap meat, it is either cruel or unhealthy. Or both. What low meat prices signal is that something in the process that brought that meat to your plate has gone horribly awry. And worse, were it not for massive subsidies, none of it would be this way.

+ For the 5,247th time.... Congressional recess is not the same thing as "vacation." Even members of the media who know better constantly fall into this mistake. When Congress is in recess, members go home to their districts to work, not to some tropical isle to sip fruity drinks. Meeting with constituents might not be glamorous, but it is an important part of their job. Would we prefer that they lived in DC year-round? No. So why then do we talk about recess this way?

+ And last but not least... apparently fish can both count and reason. As I always try to remind people, we humans are not nearly as unique and special as we think we are.

Via Chris Orr....

Hillary Clinton, March 17:

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, March 21:

Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her [1996 Bosnia] trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. "As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said Pomfret. According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss....

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.) You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

As I said yesterday, I don't think she actually consciously intends to lie about her past. Rather, I think over time she has unconsciously reshaped her own memories to better fit what she wishes her time as First Lady could have been. I honestly believe that Clinton herself would be surprised to learn that there was no sniper fire. That explains it, but it doesn't excuse it. And if you're going to vote for her, you should do it with your eyes wide open. Her foreign policy experience is a mirage.