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The speech, then, was not only notable for what the president said. It was notable — primarily notable — for the fact that he said it. The danger of the Lethal Presidency has always been its assurance that its killings are moral because they are accomplished by moral men. And so what critics of the president’s drone policy might have hoped from yesterday’s speech was that he would not merely portray himself as a moral man but rather offer to do the moral thing and submit to legal structures outside himself and the power of his office. He did some of that, saying that he asked his administration to “review” the feasibility of “a special court to evaluate and authorize legal action” or “the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch.” He also said that he was declassifying information pertaining to the four Americans killed by drone strike and promised not to sign any bill that would extend the Authorization for Use of Military Force. But mostly he did what he so often does, at his best and at his worst, using his own moral standing to advance an overarching moral vision instead of a simply political one — in this case, the end of the “war on terror” that he did not invent but has done so much to amplify and advance.

The best thing about Orson Welles’ The Trial is Anthony Perkins’ performance: Norman Bates in a vaguely central European interzone stuttering through claims that no one believes. The second best thing is the way in which the ten-dollar budget dovetails with Welles’ conception of an imagined central European interzone; the asphalt-strewn backyards of the buildings through which Perkins’ K wanders look like photos of Soviet-era apartments in Prague. Devoted to crosstalk and double entendre, Welles’ gabbiest film is true to Franz Kafka’s novel, for better or worse. I’ve never finished a Kafka book — is one supposed to? So K’s garrulousness gets on my nerves after a while. Garrulousness is modernism at its chicest, no? It’s the sense that Welles’ film, released (and buried) at the height of the Cold war, evokes.

One Democrat after another caved, entirely because they knew that if they supported LGBT rights, pathological deal-destroyer Lindsey Graham would destroy the deal. (He basically promised as much.) This is the micro form of the problem Democrats have been having since Obama took office: They want their legislation to pass, because they support the goals of their legislation. Republicans are indifferent, usually, to the goals of legislation and more concerned with how supporting or opposing bills makes them appear.

Democrats want immigration reform to pass because they want immigrants to have a chance to become citizens. Senate Republicans want to be seen as in favor of reform but they also wouldn’t mind (and in many cases would prefer) being seen as having been forced to regretfully withdraw their support from the reform proposal, because Democrats “overreached.”

So yesterday was a game where Republicans try to see how bad they can get away with making the bill, in order to try to get Democrats to jump ship, while Democrats tried to see how bad they had to allow the bill to be in order to retain Republican support. It’s healthcare all over again! In that fight, Republicans knew they had a strategic advantage, because Democrats desperately wanted to extend healthcare coverage to all Americans, and Republicans did not give a shit about that goal. So Republicans (and Lieberman) could just screw with the bill as much as they wanted and then not support it at all, confident that Democrats were too attached to the broader goal to give up on the bill just because there was no public option or Medicare buy-in.

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do we not see this principle at work everywhere? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so, but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our passions rather than with our understandings…We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. “Off, you lendings!” The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full swing, or goes to the Devil his own way.

Positivity is the enemy. To seek happiness, submit to hate.

“I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt once boasted. Thanks to the dearth of diaries and private papers, several generations of FDR scholars have had to rely on the testimony of administration officials to learn what exactly he held in either hand. In no other category has the president’s improvisatory approach to public policy affected his reputation than his posture towards the Jews; his habits, according to Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews, “did not make it easy for later generations to sort out his calculation of trade-offs on Jewish issues.” Some of the most serious charges include keeping the St. Louis and its cargo of European Jewish refugees adrift in the Caribbean and rescinding plans to bomb railroad lines to Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. The Batista regime in Cuba, the authors counter, bore the responsibility by reneging on agreements (and bribes); one of the Roosevelt administration’s ad-hoc executive boards persuaded Belgium, France, Britain, and Holland to accept the refugees. Of the 620, 365 survived the war. Hollywood would immortalize the trauma in Voyage of the Damned, in which Faye Dunaway and an adrift supporting cast crunched on lines through chiffon, veils, and pancake makeup. As for Auschwitz, the authors claim that FDR never approved battle plans — they shift the blame to Secretary of war Henry Stimson, a public servant in the Elihu Root school (he deserves a new biography) and an anti-Semite of the old patrician school.

In addition, Breitman and Lichtman argue that FDR “reacted more decisively” to the Nazi threat against Jews than any other world leader, including Winston Churchill. His own State Department, chaired by vacillating Southern Democrat Cordell Hull, did him no favors; Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, an anti-Semite and enemy of radicals, fought every attempt to expand refugee quotas. For a while the public agreed. The authors note a 1939 poll showing nearly half of Americans agreeing that Jews had too much influence in the country. A proposal to provide sanctuary for European Jews in South American countries met the resistance of leaders who had no use for “traders” and “intellectuals.” FDR did not flinch from denouncing Nazi atrocities, even as he mitigated the specific threat to Jews by castigating Nazi as a threat to all civilization. Credit goes to Henry Morgenthau, a Roosevelt crony and secretary of treasury whose post-war plan to devolve Germany into an agricultural Silver Age state the president dismissed. American Jews, which formed an essential component of FDR’s coalition, may have been frustrated by the tortoise steps but they never abandoned the president: the majorities by which they reelected Roosevelt are staggering.

Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.

All this combined to create an isolated office in Cincinnati, plagued by what an inspector general this week described as “insufficient oversight,” of fewer than 200 low-level employees responsible for reviewing more than 60,000 nonprofit applications a year.

In the end, this contributed to what everyone from Republican lawmakers to the president says was a major mistake: The decision by the Ohio unit to flag for further review applications from groups with “Tea Party” and similar labels. This started around March 2010, with little pushback from Washington until the end of June 2011.

“It’s really no surprise that a number of these cases blew up on the IRS,” said Marcus Owens, who ran the Exempt Organizations division from 1990 to 2000. “They had eliminated the trip wires of 25 years.”

Of course, any number of structural fixes wouldn’t stop rogue employees with a partisan ax to grind. No one, including the IRS and the inspector general, has presented evidence that political bias was a factor, although congressional and FBI investigators are taking another look.

But what is already clear is that the IRS once had a system in place to review how applications were being handled and to flag potentially problematic ones. The IRS also used to show its hand publicly, by publishing educational articles for agents, issuing many more rulings, and openly flagging which kind of nonprofit applications would get a more thorough review.

All of those checks and balances disappeared in recent years, largely the unforeseen result of an IRS restructuring in 1998, former officials and tax lawyers say.