Eugene Robinson writes today: "George W. Bush may not trust America's basic values and highest ideals, but I do"

"The Guantanamo decision will create headaches for the federal courts. The process of granting hearings to the detainees will be messy, imperfect and at times frustrating. I'm confident that in the end the system will work. George W. Bush may not trust America's basic values and highest ideals, but I do."

--Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today, "A Victory for the Rule of the Law"

I expect I'm not alone in having developed a sort of "family feeling" toward Washington Post associate editor and columnist Eugene Robinson as a part of Keith Olbermann's Countdown "family." But perhaps that just makes me more apt to notice how often he delivers the goods as a columnist.

It would be hard to top the start of his column today as an attention-getter:

It shouldn't be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can't have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they've been unjustly imprisoned -- not even on grounds of mistaken identity. But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch.

It's a sweetheart of a column. When our Gene quotes, from Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in yesterday's landmark Supreme Court ruling, the line, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," he adds, "Again, it's amazing that any president of the United States would need to have such a basic concept spelled out for him."

I encourage you to read the whole column, but I can't resist quoting the final paragraphs:

[I]t's still hard for me to believe that arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and torture continue to be debated, as if there were pros and cons. The Supreme Court has now made clear that while justice and honor may be mere inconveniences for Bush, they remain essential components of our national identity.

"The nation will live to regret what the court has done today," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissent, warning that the ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Everyone hopes he's wrong, of course. But if the only thing that mattered were security, why would we bother to have an independent judiciary? Why would there be any constitutional or legal guarantees of due process for anyone? We could just lock up anyone who fit the demographic profile of the average armed robber, say, or anyone with psychological traits often displayed by embezzlers.

The Guantanamo decision will create headaches for the federal courts. The process of granting hearings to the detainees will be messy, imperfect and at times frustrating. I'm confident that in the end the system will work. George W. Bush may not trust America's basic values and highest ideals, but I do.

Isn't it nice to be able to feel good again about basic American values? Perhaps one day soon we'll have a president who can do that.


AND SPEAKING OF JUSTICE NINO . . .

Jonathan Turley was in top form again talking about the Supreme Court detainee ruling last night on Countdown. (And let me take this opportunity to apologize for misassociating him recently with "Georgetown" rather than George Washington U.) I was especially pleased to hear him register surprise and scorn for Justice Scalia's loony rant of a dissenting opinion, an imbecilic barrage of mindless, thuggish, intentionally incendiary fear-mongering.

In a way I was happy too that he distinguished between this "bad opinion" of the justice's and "some good ones" that he's written. Happy, because I unhesitatingly yield to Professor Turley's knowledge of Supreme Court opinions and it comes as something of a relief to learn that our Nino is judged to have written some good opinions. I've never read one.

As I've mentioned here a number of times, I'm always astonished by this reputation Justice Scalia has for having a "great legal mind." Not that I read by any means all of his opinions, but I've never read one that seemed to me the product of an even mediocre legal mind. For logic as well as legal knowledge an average 12-year-old, it always seems to me, could do way better. All I usually find is a bullying far-right-wing ideologue -- sometimes notable for a supercilious better-than-thou tone, but more often sounding like a garden-variety hoodlum.

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