In his new Vanity Fair piece on torture, international lawyer Philippe Sands interviews former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who “played a major role in developing the interrogation policy for Guantanamo Bay.” Feith tells Sands that he shouldn’t be concerned with torture and America’s “moral authority,” because then he is “siding with the assholes“:

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

Does Feith therefore think Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is an “asshole”?

In recent days, Sen. John McCain has sought to distance himself rhetorically from President Bush’s foreign policy. But on right-wing radio talker Mike Gallagher’s show this past Friday, McCain struck a different tone, proudly declaring that “no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.” “Let me emphasize that there are many national security issues that I have strongly supported the president and steadfastly so,” added McCain.

Listen here:

Later in the interview, McCain reiterated that he has “agreed with the president on many issues,” though he said “there are some issues” they have not agreed on.

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Today, President Bush held a press conference in Romania with the country’s president, Traian Basescu. The AP notes that typically, “as a matter of courtesy and protocol, the host decides when such an event is over. But Bush has been known to ignore that practice.” Today, Bush “figured the question-and-answer session was done” and “strolled over to Basescu and asked if he was ready to take a walk by the water.” Basescu “politely” finished the press conference, however, and Bush had to head “back to his podium” until the event was over:

BUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Oh, you want to go over here?

BASESCU: Just a moment.

BUSH: Oh, you got –

BASESCU: Just a moment.

BUSH: He’s not through.

BASESCU: The information I would like to add to refer to two delicate issues, issues that are visible for the Romanian public. …

After the event was really over, the two men strolled by the water.

I was thinking to myself the other day that, paradoxically, one of the more pernicious aspects of pseudo-meritocracy in America is that even if you’re given a lot of advantages in life it still is genuinely difficult to acquire certain kinds of highly sought-after positions. This is well-expressed by Keith Gessen in this essay on college admissions:

Even worse than the temporary psychological distortion is, as Lemann argued in “The Big Test,” the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers.

I found that essay via Kathy G. who wisely remarks that “a distressingly large number of people in our society seem to believe that going to college is proof that they’re “smarter” than their non-college-educated fellow citizens, and therefore more deserving of respect, status, and the comforts of middle-class life” despite the fact that “In the U.S., low income is likely to be a huge barrier to going to college, even among the highest scoring students.”

More broadly, the merit illusion stems from the well-documented fact that people don’t have a great intuitive grasp of statistics or large numbers. If your family connections boost your odds of getting into Harvard from one percent to five percent, you’ll perceive that as having triumphed against the odds on merit rather than using family connections to quintuple your chances. And then once you’re in it is, again, a genuinely difficult, competitive process to get a job at an investment bank. And climbing to the top of the i-banking world is, again, a genuinely difficult and competitive process.

It’s difficult, however, for people to keep in their heads the idea that, yes, you may have displayed considerable merit to get where you are but also you’ve taken advantage of a lot of undeserved privileges of birth. Similarly, if you wind up needing to compete on merit against a few hundred other people for a couple dozen highly desirable slots, the question of what happened to all those other people who got excluded from consideration for non-merit reasons sort of falls out of sight.

In a recent interview with GQ, former Bush adviser Karl Rove criticized Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for “not wearing a flag lapel pin,” saying that “to a lot of ordinary people, putting that flag lapel pin on is true patriotism.” As Rove made this comment, however, interviewer Lisa Depaulo noticed that he wasn’t wearing a pin:

DEPAULO: You’re not wearing a flag pin, Karl.

ROVE: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But I respect those who consciously get up in the morning and put a flag lapel pin on.

Rove’s ironic moment of criticism echoes a similar gaffe by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA). In February, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams caught Kingston attacking Obama over the pins while not wearing one himself.