For nearly two terms in office, Team Bush has been undermining what constitutional conservative scholar Bruce Fein calls the "very architecture of the Constitution." And they've had a pretty good run at it.
    Let's see. we've already destroyed the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable search and seizure.  Has that stopped terrorism cold?  Does Osama Bin Laden quiver in fear because we have crippled the Fifth and Sixth Amendments?
    And the First? Have we defanged Islamist extremists by damaging the First Amendment?  Are we any safer?  Does this strike you as an effective remedy to terrorism?

The words are from the last book of Molly Ivins, cowritten with Lou Dubose.    These are Mollys' words, from her introduction, entitled with the words of Ben Franklin: "A REPUBLIC - IF WE CAN KEEP IT."

Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights is a book you SHOULD read.  If you are reading my words, you care about our fundamental rights, as did Ivins.  Let me illustrate.

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq’s vast oil reserves. As The Times reported Monday, "At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry."

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

Bob Herbert asks us that question in his column today, entitled ‘Oh Happy Day’ because he tells us that is what one would here sung in the executive suites of oil companies after the deals they just made in Iraq.    The question is what achieving the happy day for the oil companies has cost the rest of us.

This is just crazy! The story of Cheney's having been the de facto prez since before day-one is the story of this administration -- even more so than Iraq. Had some marginally mainstream Rethug such as James Baker been veep, there'd have been no Iraq -- or any of the countless other Cheney- and Cheney/Rumsfeld-instigated lunacies.

The Slangwhanger-in-Chief's sainted mother told him never to call names. Yet she was wrong, at least insofar as the naming function is an important part of politics. Think of the soon-to-be-defeated Rep. Mean Jean Schmidt.

This list is offered to the world not at all in the spirit of Microsoft setting international software standards to confine everyone to their obscenely profitable, if functionally crippled, bailiwick. No, it is given more in what J.D. Salinger called "the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age 3, presenting a luncheon companion with a cool lima bean." This almost entirely original, mint-condition codification is therefore released for the use of those in search of a handy guide to progressive terms of invective.