Last year around this time, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston did what teenagers have done since the dawn of Man, and will continue to do until Our Mr. Sun bloats us out of existence.

It was the biggest mistake of their lives.

No, not because Levi forgot to wear a little rubber thingy on his John Thomas, although he should have known better. The mistake was one we all share: Inability to see the future.

Who could have guessed, that passionate moment in Spring 2008, that Bristol’s mom would be plucked from obscurity a few months later and immediately begin methodically abusing every minor within her reach?

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As devoted practitioners of the Raised Eyebrow, we got a good workout Monday night when this headline appeared at WorldNetDaily: “Teen homeschooler jailed under Patriot Act.”

That’s pretty rich, we thought, coming from a website that is deeply concerned about Michael Savage being fingered as a hate-speech terrorist by Britain. Somehow we don’t expect to find an ACLU card in Joseph Farah’s wallet.

But setting aside their angle for the moment, let’s look at the case.

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Our interest in the Bush Administration’s torture program remains focused on its early development, but with the Zelikow Memo heating up, it might help to look at what light it sheds on what we’ve learned.

Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice’s counselor at State and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, will be testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee next Tuesday. Zelikow saw the torture memos from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel shortly after they were issued in May 2005, and wrote up “an opposing view of the legal reasoning.”

Zelikow was not on Rice’s legal team, and so had no official standing in the discussion. But apparently a written memo was more than the torture advocates could bear:

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We just discovered these cool CDC Social Media Tools from Barry’s new Twitter feed, and… and…

Shit. It’s like the Internet just bought a leisure suit.

White House joins Facebook, MySpace, Twitter [USA Today]

One of the fond memories of our increasingly distant youth is of lovable reactionaries, folks so beyond the pale that they were barely worth a warm head-shaking Paul Harvey chuckle.

And either we’re regressing, or those days are returning.

We’ve often expressed our gratitude for WorldNetDaily, which boldly goes where Drudge fears to tread, and spares us the trouble of cruising dozens of wingnut websites. But lately we’ve noticed they’ve been letting us down, with hysterical stories not even remotely relevant to the issues of the day. (Trust us, Joe, the Fairness Doctrine is a non-starter.) It’s hard to play fearmonger when the nation is increasingly confident about itself.

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We already know the Senate is inherently undemocratic — Alaska gets the same two votes as California, after all.

We also know that in practice, the Senate is even more undemocratic — it takes 60 votes to shut down a filibuster.

But now that Al Franken is poised to claim that 60th vote for the Democrats (as well as claim another decade for himself), we got to wondering whether the Senate was still more undemocratic than we realized.

And guess what?

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The greatest war crime of all is the one that cannot be prosecuted: the war itself.

Fifteen minutes after a hijacked jet smashed into the Pentagon, the NSA intercepted a message tying the morning’s attacks to al Qaeda. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told of the intercept just after noon. Yet by 2:40 p.m. he was demanding “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].… Need to move swiftly.… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

We’ve long known what followed: An 18-month disinformation campaign to justify an illegal war in Iraq. We’ve known about cherry-picking intelligence. We’ve known about the blatant disregard of informed expert advice. We’ve known about the Orwellian abuse of language to hide the truth.

It should come as no surprise that the torture policy, crafted by the same men at the same time and for the same purpose, was no different.

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