The Carpetbagger Report: Carl Bernstein, Noni Scalia, Bush Wasting Gas To Tell Us To Conserve It, McCain

Steve at The Carpetbagger Report gives us a lot in a tiny package (the thing about Bush wasting all that fuel while telling us to conserve is Quintessential Compassionate Conservative Bushie):

* Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, said yesterday that the American system “worked” with Nixon, because a corrupt president was driven from office, the same system has “failed tragically” when it comes to Bush. “Nixon and his men lied and abused the constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped,” Bernstein explained. “The Bush Administration — especially its top officials named above and others familiar to most Americans — was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a (Republican) bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush, and that our elected representatives in Congress and our judiciary had been courageous enough to do their duty and hold the President and his aides accountable.”

* Justice Scalia described the 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling yesterday as “water over the deck — get over it.” Moreover, Justice Kennedy added that Al Gore’s lawyers were responsible for bringing the case to the courts in the first place, while former Justice O’Connor said the outcome of the election would have been the same even if the court had not intervened. All three are entirely wrong.

* There is something deeply amusing about the idea of the president using a 747 to travel from DC to Wilmington, Delaware, and back, in order to make “a sales pitch for [his] plan to reduce projected gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years.” As The Plank put it, “Maybe the next time Bush wants to talk about reducing energy consumption he should, you know, not gratuitously consume energy in the process.”

* McCain suggested, on the air, that initial polling about Bush announced his escalation policy showed that Americans approved of the idea. Greg Sargent sets the record straight.