I realize you don't want to think about Iran-Contra, but what if it helps you see what George W. Bush has in common with the Emperor Caligula?

There are a lot of smart people out there, I know. People who know, for example, how to download and stream and do whatever the heck you do with radio broadcasts that are there online if only you knew how to get at them (and also, in many cases, if you weren't too cheap to pay for them). I'm tempted to ask you to try to show me, but that might be pointless. Instead, let me just encourage you to do whatever-it-is with this morning's genuinely special Rachel Maddow show on Air America Radio.

In introducing the show, which was pretaped for the holiday, Rachel noted that her show is normally driven by the day's news, and it has to be. It's meant to be a morning news show—to prepare listeners with the basic information we need to carry into our daily lives. I was glad to hear her say this, because this is exactly the function I've come to depend on the show for.

(If you're not able to hear the show, I feel bad for you. You don't know what you're missing. It's just a shame that Air America Radio and your local affiliate are run by baboons. Well, it's not so much that they're baboons per se, but that unfortunately they're not among the smarter baboons. Actually, they would seem to be drawn from the ranks of the dunce baboons.)

The problem with being so headline-oriented, Rachel explained, is that you're often unable to get at the stories hidden beneath the headlines, the underlying currents that don't often get talked about but that you have a strong feeling are the things that actually drive the news. Her own attention, she noted, has focused increasingly on the nearly 20-year-old Iran-Contra scandal. It all goes back to Iran-Contra, she's found herself thinking.

Does everyone today even know what Iran-Contra was? It was that messy business when the Reagan administration flouted an unambiguous congressional prohibition against providing aid to the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua by breaking even more laws and in darkest secrecy selling arms to Iran, then funneling a chunk of the proceeds to the Contras.

In a phone interview, The Nation's John Nichols (who has a book coming out about impeachment) argued that we haven't recovered from the damage done by the failure to impeach Reagan. He acknowledged that there wasn't much stomach for impeachment back then, since Reagan's power was already essentially gone, and he was widely understood to be sailing off into the sunset of Alzheimer's. Nevertheless, the failure to pursue impeachment had the effect of demonstrating that the president can do whatever he damned pleases, even in deliberate defiance of the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress, and even in the worst-possible case, where the whole bloody thing blows up in his face, there is no price to pay beyond a pro forma wrist slap.

This much you probably remember if you lived through Iran-Contra. What no one remembers, because as Vice President Cheney himself puts it laughingly, no one read it, is that the debacle produced a document that has served as a blueprint for the unprecedented expansion of presidential power which has been the "governing principle" of the Chimpy Bush presidency.

Among the plethora of committees that launched thumb-sucking inquests into Iran-Contra, the most important was a congressional joint committee that issued a report fairly critical of the administration's conduct. The report was bipartisan, in the sense that a good number of Republicans signed onto it along with the then-majority Democrats. Not all, however. Having wangled himself into the role of ranking House Republican on the committee, Rep. Dick Cheney ordered up a minority report, the gist of which was that fingers ought to be pointed, not at the president, but at Congress, for passing laws that the administration rightly felt obliged to flout. Such laws, the report argued, are an unconstitutional intrusion on the president's war powers.

Now let's pause to make clear that the Constitution says no such thing, and it's so unambiguous about it that I can think of only two ways that you can misread it this way:

(1) If you are insane, and I mean literally insane, so that while your eyes are passing over the text of the Constitution, your brain is registering only the voices you hear in your head.

(2) If you're a lying, closeted totalitarian thug who doesn't give a damn what the Constitution says because those voices in your head keep telling you that human beings are meant to be governed by an all-powerful emperor. (Hmm, No. 2 seems to have kind of come around to the same point as No. 1. Funny thing about that.)

The case is even clearer if you know anything about the concerns of the Founders. Oh, not in the way that a pompous phony like Nino Scalia claims to understand their intent, when in fact he's driven solely by his uncontrollable inner ideological compulsions. It's unmistakable both from their deliberations and writings of the Founders, and of course from what they wrote into the Constitution that they were concerned in a really fundamental way with making sure that the president would not have the kind of unchecked power to conduct war that, say, the king of England had.

Apparently, though, if you're Dick Cheney, you don't care. I guess where the Founders are concerned, he's more of a "Madness of King George" kind of guy. His basic attitude to anyone who disagrees with his totalitarian fantasies, whether it's the Founders or just some damned liberal U.S. senator, appears to be: "Fuck off!"

It was the vice president himself who tipped reporters to the buried Iran-Contra minority report, a story that's told well by another of Rachel's guests on today's show, the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage. Savage is the reporter who broke the story of the Bush administration's unprecedented use of "signing statements" to bash as well as circumvent Congress. In this May 28 piece, Savage ties the whole signing-statement program, which has been a personal project of Cheney enforcer David Addington, to the vice president's vision of an uncheckable presidency as articulated in the Iran-Contra minority report.

Once you see the context, as Rachel suggested, other things fall into place. For example, when the scandal of the NSA's secret phone surveillance program broke, she was fascinated by the early disclosure that congressional allies of the administration had offered as early as 2002 to amend the procedures outlined by FISA to make just about any kind of intelligence-gathering the administration wanted to do legal and that they were decisively rebuffed.

Why, she wondered, were the president's people so adamantly un-interested in making their dirty work legal? Of course it makes sense once you realize that it would violate one of these people's most cherished principles to allow the suggestion that Congress is entitled even to a say in what it is or isn't legal for the president to do in "security" matters.

It's interesting, though, that beyond accusations of treason against those who fail to uncritically "support our troops," and by extension the president who sent them in harm's way to cause all that destruction and suffering and in the process get killed and maimed themselves, is never argued before the American people. Didn't prospective Bush voters have a right to know that they were voting for a man who would remake the U.S. government into a dictatorship?

I suppose one reason the president never argues this case to the people is that he doesn't understand it, except in the limited sense that the toadies around him always say to him, "You da man, Chimpy . . . er, Mister President." But the president has given lots of speeches filled with stuff he didn't understand. Was this central philosophical belief, which has also been a central principle of action during his presidency, just omitted inadvertently?

I don't think so. I think people like Karl Rove understand that belief in an imperial presidency is one of those things you don't talk about publicly. Oh, the famous "base" probably includes lots of people who are quite sympathetic to autocracy, and for their benefit you can wink and obfuscate. But there are a lot of other voters who might not only disagree, but be positively horrified, to understand that this is what they voted for.

And talk about providing ammunition to your enemies! Once you start talking publicly about George W. Bush being emperor of . . . well, all of God's universe, it's just a matter of time before someone conjures up the image of the Emperor Caligula.