We did not go looking for trouble

Antonin Scalia says, “The [2000] election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble.” He says that studies by news organizations suggest that Bush would have won a recount. That’s wrong, but Scalia, whose position in 2000 was that we should all get on with our lives and not have an accurate vote count, does not get to cite anything other than the fatally flawed Katherine Harris count. Scalia adds that there would have been a more difficult transition had the Court not ruled as it did, and worse, it might have been a transition to the guy who was actually, you know, elected president.

The NYT interviews Iraqi interior minister Bayan Jabr, who denies running Shiite death squads (phew) and jabrs (sorry) about that secret prison raided by the Americans last week. “Only a few detainees were punched and hit,” he claims. Reports last week were that “instruments of torture” were found there, which suggests that rather more than punching and hitting was going on, but we still haven’t been told what those instruments were. Nor what has happened to the prisoners, who Jabr describes as the “worst of the worst,” because there’s nothing more reassuring than stealing your rhetoric from Donald Rumsfeld.