"Comparatively, Nixon was an honest thug."

Blogger Quincy Adams at the Reality-Based Community site, compares Richard Nixon's defense of his own actions (i.e., "If the president says so, it's not illegal") with Condi Rice's recent attempt to justify waterboarding of prisoners. Essentially, her defense is: If the president's lawyers say so, then it's not illegal.
Adams thinks this is worse, in a way, because it attempts to obfuscate the executive power grab behind some legalese.
I think I agree. Nixon's argument was so self-obviously wrong that it is hard to use it as a banner to rally support to. What Rice is doing (and what other defenders of the Bush administration have done when they simultaneously deny that there was torture and claim that torture was necessary) is to successfully divert attention from the fact that waterboarding is unequivocally illegal under international law, and thus turn the issue into one of politics rather than law. Thus, should the Obama administration attempt to enforce anti-torture laws by prosecuting former officials, they are not acting as lawmen but as partisans.
The pessimist in me says this strategy is going to work, but I hope it doesn't.