President Dick Cheney may be tired and a little shell-shocked in the wake of the recent hunting accident in which he shot an old friend in the face, but nevertheless he managed to catch himself immediately after he accidentally told the truth last week.

Our nation has been living in a fearful somnolence, drunk on a wine of vengeance of our own making, and like most drunks we are angry, fearful, incoherent in our rants and short sighted in our objectives. Worse, we willingly surrender our principles, our essential freedoms, our dignity, our character and any real meaningful action for another nip of the draught that has become the focal point of our lives.

Invoking the ghost of Nancy Reagan, legendary Washington hostess Sally Quinn begged Laura Bush on Monday to take a broom to the White House. Quinn, who is married to retired Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, credits Mrs. Reagan with ending the Cold War after disposing of the Iran-Contra scandal, and suggests that Laura not only could but must do as well by her man.

I suppose reporters have to report that Andy Card has surrendered his chief of staff job to Josh Bolten, the president’s budget obfuscator and Card’s former deputy, but do pundits really have to root around to find some significance in the move?

New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, recently returned to Baghdad, has two stories in the paper this weekend. One is an overview of the changes he sees from his first tour in the country, and the other is what might be characterized as a human interest story, with the humans in question being Baghdad civilians who have been tortured and murdered in recent weeks.

Via Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque, we learn that hot document repository The Smoking Gun has obtained a copy of the requirements Dick Cheney’s advance team provides to hotels hosting the veep when he’s off hunting supporters and money.

I wrote yesterday about a bill signing statement in which president Bush once again asserted his authority, under the rubric of national security, to ignore laws passed by Congress and signed by him. Gleen Greenwald offers a much more substantial response to the practice today, and Atrios, in pointing to the Greenwald piece, says “I have no idea how to wake the slumbering press.”

In a bill signing statement similar to the one in which he asserted the right to ignore the McCain anti-torture amendment, George Bush has notified Congress that he isn’t bound by provisions for Congressional oversight of FBI powers granted under the recently revised Patriot Act.

Two recent deals highlight the Bush administration’s schizophrennic approach to national security. One involves an Israeli firm has scrapped plans to buy Sourcefire, a US computer security company, in the face of skepticism from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS). The other involves a contract with a Hong Kong-based company to operate sensitive radiation detection equipment at a Bahamian port.

The Washington Post is second only to the dread New York Times as an object of right-wing press bashing. So when the Post hired a young Republican blogger in a putative effort to add a conservative voice to its roster of right-leaning editorialists, reporters who suffer periodic fits of Republican talking point logorrhea and an ossified readers representative who hates readers, one could be forgiven for thinking the newspaper was simply reacting to the needling of its critics and at the same time providing moderate critics with an endlessly entertaining piñata.