There'll Be No More Aaaaaaaaa-aah-aah!

• Scott Horton in Harper's:

  In 2004, a group of prominent alumni of the Justice Department’s once-prestigious Office of Legal Counsel, shaken by disclosure of the torture memoranda and other evidence of unethical conduct within the office, signed a statement of principles to guide the Justice Department’s opinion writers. “When providing legal advice to guide contemplated executive branch action, OLC should provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies,” they wrote. “The advocacy model of lawyering, in which lawyers craft merely plausible legal arguments to support their clients’ desired actions, inadequately promotes the President’ s constitutional obligation to ensure the legality of executive action.” Have the new tenants at Justice lived up to these principles? Not so much.

  and further elaborates on this at Foreign Policy:

  Apparently Obama's lawyers told him he could do it, and he liked their advice: "Prior congressional approval was not constitutionally required to use military force in the limited operations under consideration." We know this from the opinion drafted by U.S. Justice Department lawyers on April 1, which was publicly released on April 7, on the legality of military operations in Libya following the U.N. Security Council's go-ahead. The document presents few surprises and looks remarkably like a pair of memoranda -- cited in the new opinion -- that former Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger, then head of President Bill Clinton's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), wrote to authorize the use of military force in Haiti and Bosnia. As such it is typical of the Obama Justice Department: It avoids referring back to the opinions written during the executive-power-expanding heyday of President George W. Bush's first term, while arriving at markedly similar conclusions.

• Driftglass on the American reluctance to face the realities of the Civil War (begun 150 years ago), with extensive quotes and a note on the evanescence of words:

  But there have been other struggles whose importance endures long past the death of the king and the last veteran's widow -- battles over the essential meaning of things: what it is to be human, to be free, to be a citizen, to be a Jew, to be a woman, to be a slave, to be an Irishman, to be the Other.

• Also on the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's been studying it in depth lately:

  I am telling you now--check out the books they own. It is your civic duty as an American to educate yourself about the country you claim to love. This is the revolution that birthed us. And at this late date, it's shockingly evident that many of us don't really know what happened. Our media isn't even sure what happened. Scholars who are the very face of black studies in this country give license to this ignorance.

Mr. Coates also pointed to a nifty article by another editor at the Atlantic on what Donald Trump's expensive investigators will find and how much it costs (sans mai-tai).  Really, racism makes one stupid, if one isn't already.