Goodbye to David Frost.

Dead of a heart attack, which happened last night on board the Queen Elizabeth. He was 74.

You might think first of his interviews with Richard Nixon...



... but I remember him from the early 60s comedy show — a precursor to "The Daily Show" — "That Was the Week That Was."

David Weigel smugly mouths a most despicable theory of presidential power.

His post is titled "Why Obama Doesn't Need to Ask Congress Before Attacking Libya." He posits:

It's simple: Most of Washington doesn't want him to. To coin a phrase: If they want the president to do it, that means it's legal.

The allusion is to the famous Nixon quote (which was distorted for effect in ads for the movie "Frost/Nixon"): "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." Why would Weigel repurpose that quote? Is he criticizing Obama? Nixon asserted that "in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about."

Does anyone argue that attacking Libya is needed to preserve the United States? But quite aside from that, Nixon was talking about the President stepping up and doing what he thinks is needed. That's entirely different from saying that a structural safeguard entrusted to Congress may be dispensed with whenever Congress doesn't feel like taking responsibility.

Now, possibly Weigel is thinking everyone knows Nixon was wrong — false, but let's assume it — and so presenting a theory in the Nixon format is a way of saying it's wrong. But I think that's way too subtle for Weigel to have intended. I think what he meant was to adopt a political pragmatism, which he imagines Nixon to have used. In that view, the President acquires power when Congress avoids its responsibility. Weigel continues in this vein [quoting Lindsey Graham, with apparent approbation]:

"I don't believe he needs to come to Congress. I'd gladly vote on what he did. I think it's inherent within the authority of the commander-in-chief to take such action."

Such action? What action? Helping out rebels in a foreign country where our national security is not at stake?

"We have been overly cautious, unnervingly indecisive. This thing melted down. I wish we would have acted sooner. I don't feel a need to bless this action before he took it. I'd be glad to vote on it afterwards."

Bless?  Glad? It's not about your feelings or Congress's avoidance of formal gestures. Either there is a serious constitutional safeguard here or there is not. If there is, it doesn't disappear because you are comfortable without it or because Congress holds back. If there is a constitutional safeguard, it is a permanent guarantee that goes to us, the people.

"As we get closer to the convention, if it is a stalemate, everybody will be going after everybody’s delegates."

“All the rules will be going out the window.” So says a senior Clinton official, according to Politico. Look out, Obambi, Hillary is working out ways to steal your pledged delegates — the delegates you think you already won in the primaries and caucuses.

Pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, not even on the first ballot. This has been an open secret in the party for years, but it has never really mattered because there has almost always been a clear victor by the time the convention convened....

“Delegates are NOT bound to vote for the candidate they are pledged to at the convention or on the first ballot,” a recent DNC memo states. “A delegate goes to the convention with a signed pledge of support for a particular presidential candidate. At the convention, while it is assumed that the delegate will cast their vote for the candidate they are publicly pledged to, it is not required.”

Should we conclude that the Clinton campaign is evil? Or is this just evidence of the campaign's competence, that it's exploring all the permutations of the fight for the nomination? The Clinton aid prefaces his remark with: "I swear it is not happening now."

Ha. That reminds me of one of my favorite Nixon quotes: "We could do it, but that would be wrong."

Did Nixon really say that, and what was he talking about? I've been using that "Nixon quote" for decades, because I think it's so funny. It reveals a mind that thinks through the wrong things that could be done and even says them out loud — then, realizing how bad it sounds tries to nullify the statement with a terse invocation of morality. Ah! It seems the original quote is: "We could kill him. But that would be wrong."

On the White House Tapes, Nixon and his advisors were discussing what they should do about one of these enemies.... And Nixon said, "We could kill him." During the David Frost - Richard Nixon interviews, Nixon complained bitterly that we didn't get to listen to what he said next, presumably because it had been accidentally erased. What he claimed to have said next was, "But that would be wrong."

I like that. It's a much better quote, that way: "We could kill him, but that would be wrong."

Searching the web to verify the old quote, I hit upon "He Was a Crook," Hunter S. Thompson's essay on the death of Richard Nixon:

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

Hey... badger! That reminds me: I've got to go vote in the Wisconsin primary.

But, Hillary and Hillary people: Think about your legacy. Maybe this Hunter S. Thompson quote could help you think clearly:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

UPDATE: The Clinton campaign says: I'm not a crook.

Newark!

Ah, Satan's Laundromat is photoblogging Newark. These are my kind of photographs, and I will be heading to Newark at the end of this week for the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Annual Health Law Teachers Conference. I'm not a health law teacher, but I was asked to speak on the subject of New Federalism and Health Law. I'm only speaking for 15 minutes, but I'm charged up at the moment to draft an article with the title "Experimenting With Drugs in the Laboratories of Democracy: Assisted Suicide, Medical Marijuana, and Federalism."

It will be interesting to see Newark, a city I lived quite near when I was a high school student. We lived in Wayne, New Jersey, in a community called Packanack Lake, that had an exclusionary scheme--you had to be accepted into the "country club" to be allowed to buy a house--that got enough press that they sang a song about it on "That Was The Week That Was," which was kind of The Daily Show of its time. Except weekly. And David Frost was on it. Newark was considered too uninteresting/ugly/dangerous to visit. If you wanted to be in the city, you'd go to New York. Another thing I always held against Newark is that it impinged on my original home town of Newark, Delaware. If you said you were from Newark (pronounced "New Ark") and didn't add Delaware, everyone not from New-Ark would try to make you say it in an unpleasant slurred New Jersey way. And now the dominating New Jersey city has even overwhelmed my own pronunciation. I have to stop and think to say the name of my own home town right.

So maybe I'll have some gritty Newark sights to photoblog like Satan's. Or maybe I'll take a side trip to Wayne and see what's happened to it in the 30+ years since I've laid eyes on it. But you can't be in northern New Jersey without longing to be in NYC, and I intend to ensconce myself in a nice hotel looking out on Central Park on Saturday and Sunday. I want walk around the City again, and see some museums, including these frogs. Maybe I'll go to the theater, but it's too early to see The Frogs.