Diane McWhorter in Slate:

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.