Audacity and mendacity.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Geroge W. Bush

The audacity and mendacity of the Bus Administration mount by the day. This Presidency has become an increasing menace to our constitutional system.

Days after the Katrina disaster, and minutes after he woke up to it, Bush promised to cooperate fully with any Congressional inquiry. "Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough," he said.

But that was then. Now Bush is buttoning the lips of the entire Administration.

Even Senator Joe Lieberman, who usually is so eager to sit on the President's lap, has registered his displeasure.

"Almost every question our staff has asked federal agency witnesses regarding conversations with or involvement of the White House has been met with a response that they could not answer on direction of the White House," said Lieberman, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

FEMA lawyers advised Heckofajob Brownie "not to say whether he spoke to the President or the Vice President, or comment on the substance of conversations he had with any other high-level White House officials," Lieberman said.

No, that would require accountability, and that's the last thing this White House wants. It views itself as accountable to no one.

And so it doesn't hand over documents to Congress to let our elected officials properly investigate the NSA scandal. And it defends warrantless domestic spying with pure chutzpah and imperious assertions.

But before I get into those, let me just point out that the President straight up lied about warrantless spying when he was running for reelection.

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order," he said on the campaign trail. "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do SO."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was no more forthcoming. At his confirmation hearings in January 2005, Senator Russ Feingold asked Gonzales: "Does the President, in your opinion, have the authority, acting as commander in chief, to authorize warrantless searches of Americans' homes and wiretaps of their conversations in violation of the criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance statutes of this country?"

Gonzales dodged that the first time, and when Feingold followed up in a more general way-whether "the President has the constitutional authority, at least in theory, to authorize violations of criminal law"--Gonzales said, "Senator, in my judgment, you have phrased sort of a hypothetical situation."

But there was nothing hypothetical about...