Atrios and Matt Yglesias point out that the Administration is on a treadmill of illegality. Evidence based on illegal wiretaps or on torture can’t be introduced in court. So illegal action makes it impossible to get court approval for further steps, making more illegal actions inevitable.
Shakespeare’s Richard III found himself in the same position:
Uncertain way of gain! But I am inSo far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Footnote Ben Azzai says (Pirke Avot 4:2) “The penalty for each transgression is the next transgression.”
Two great quotes for the price of none!
Speaking of quotes, there was the time last summer when a friend and I, getting depressed as usual about the state of the administration, flipped open a Gideon Bible.
The verse we randomly lit on was Isaiah 16:14. In the KJ it goes “But now the Lord hath spoken, saying, Within three years, as the years of an hireling, and the glory of Moab shall be contemned, and with all that great multitude; and the remnant shall be very small and feeble.”
I liked the sound of “hireling.” And wasn’t “Moab” what they called that fuel-air bomb they were creaming themselves about just before the war?
Biblical prophecy is no one’s monopoly.