A Rutgers law professor is calling on Congress to legislate “a form of preventive detention adapted to terrorism, and outside the criminal justice system” for terrorism suspects in order to spare US courts the frustration of attempting to try them. John Farmer says in a New York Times op-ed piece that trials such as those of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani threaten the fair administration of the law for the rest of us and border on the prosecution of thought crimes. Prosecuting thought crimes is bad, he says, so instead we should just lock thought criminals up indefinitely and not prosecute them.

Problem solved; after all, the government would never abuse the legislated power to grab someone and lock them away forever with no charges.

Memo to Rutgers law students: don’t take tips on logic from this guy.

Memo to John Farmer: Gitmo clues.

On the good news from Iraq front, the country’s defense minister says the Iraqis will as promised be able to take complete control of their own internal security by November … of 2012. Taken together with the news that Iraq’s parliament passed a law that promotes national reconciliation by outlawing minority political thought—was John Farmer a consultant on this?—and one can’t help but conclude that good times are just around the bend, right behind the light at the end of the tunnel.

Returning for a moment, because it’s so reminiscent of Farmer, to something we noted a few days ago, wherein Air Force General Charles Dunlap sang the praises of air power in yet another sterling New York Times op-ed product. Bernhard at Moon of Alabama found an earlier and elsewhere Dunlap essay in which he posited that the embarrassments of Haditha, where Marines murdered two dozen civilians, and Abu Ghraib, where US military personnel tormented and tortured Iraqi prisoners, could have been avoided by the use of “relatively sterile” air power. Dunlap’s argument, when you distill it, is that the problems at Abu Ghraib arose from the inexplicable failure of ground forces to simply kill all the potential prisoners and thus remove any temptation to abuse them. Similarly, the Marines at Haditha were morons for not calling in air strikes and pre-emptively converting troublesome war crimes victims into the more sanitary collateral damage. And similarly, the problems of trying terrorism suspects could be avoided by disposing of them more tidily elsewhere.

Should Congress perhaps incorporate the best that both Farmer and Dunlap have to offer, and legislate that terrorism suspects be held at an Air Force bombing range?

Good times, brought to you by the newspaper that refused to publish Congressman Robert Wexler’s op-ed column for hearings aimed at impeaching Dick Cheney. Maybe if he’d advocated bombing the White House or locking Cheney up without charges, or locking Cheney up and then bombing him, instead …

A reminder: Mark Halperin, one of the most respected political journalists in the country (respected by other journalists, not by readers), thinks smear artist Matt Drudge is just like Walter Cronkite.

You all remember how Cronkite always kept the hotline open for Republicans dishing dirt, right? And how once he picked up on one smear or another, he pulled every other journalist alive along in his wake?

Yeah, me neither. I mention Halperin because he’s perhaps the most accessible example of how smug and vapid political journalists can be—there really is a “Gang of 500,” and they really are unimaginably inane—and offers easy insight into why political campaign coverage in the institutional press is so often hideously misdirected.

This is also by way of a warning. Republicans, and hence Drudge, and hence Halperin and his colleagues, have been too consumed by the GOP meltdown to really crank up the slime machine against Democrats. That will change in a few weeks. Imagine 15 years of anti-Clinton venom distilled into a few months of campaigning, or 130 years of post-Reconstruction resentment aimed at Obama. If John Edwards, the token white guy, remains standing, we’ll get a barrage of pretty-boy-communist-plutocrat-shyster-who-uses-his-dying-wife-to-further-his-own-political-ends coverage.

That is, assuming anyone bothers to cover Edwards at all.

And finally, Mike Huckabee thinks the Constitution should be more like the Bible. Living God or Dead Founders: is there really any contest?

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