You get the feeling that Bush wants his presidency to be associated in people's minds forever with cruel and antidemocratic actions.
On issue after issue, President Bush has showed little indication that he will shrink from the most controversial decisions of his tenure.
With the decision to charge six Guantánamo detainees with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to seek the death penalty for the crimes, many of those issues will now be back in the spotlight. In an election year, that appears to be exactly where Mr. Bush wants the focus to be.
Sliding back to Crawford while show trials are in progress does seem fitting somehow.
Mr. Bush never sounds surer of himself than when the subject is Sept. 11, even when his critics argue that he has squandered the country’s moral authority, violated American and international law, and led the United States into the foolhardy distraction of Iraq.
Benazir Bhutto's book on democracy -- the one she put the finishing touches on the morning of the day she was assassinated -- is out. In it she says extremism flourishes under authoritarian governments, not in democracies.
On the question of warrantless wiretapping, widely expanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush is pushing to make permanent legislation that last year made a once-secret program legal, despite a storm of protest that has reverberated since 2005, when the program was disclosed.
Bush shares deep and shameful unpopularity at home and abroad with a fellow authoritarian, Pervaez Musharraf. They may wind up sharing a departure date from leadership.
Bush's inglorious exit from the White House during the exercise of kangaroo courts and justice delayed is as effective a symbol of deep divisions within this country as anything we could imagine. Over the past eight years, the threat of extremism within our own system has been considerably more dangerous than the "terrorists" over whom our about-to-be ex-president has led us into two failed wars.
