A CNN transcript of their coverage, three years ago today, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry:

MILES O’BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Got a little problem on the space shuttle Columbia. It’s been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes. Let’s take a look at a live picture of Mission Control in Houston. As we’ve been telling you all this morning, it is on its way in for a landing, and flight controllers there in Houston are busy going through their no-com procedures, in other words, lack of communication from the shuttle. They’ve been trying to raise the space shuttle Columbia for quite some time now.

…

And at this juncture, we — I cannot tell you honestly the significance of it, except to tell you that the space shuttle Columbia was due for a landing right about now. We are watching this very closely.

More of the transcript, plus other related transcripts, can be found here.
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In T.H. White’s great novel, The Once and Future King, King Arthur is a radical thinker who works to replace the rule of brute force with the rule of law. It’s not easy, and he takes some missteps along the way.

In this scene, Arthur is talking with his queen, Guenever, and his greatest knight, Lancelot. The King is worried about certain factions in his court, and Lancelot suggests that he could simply kill one critic who particularly worries him.

The King suddenly looked surprised, or shocked. He had been sitting relaxed between them, because he was tired and unhappy, yet now he drew himself up and met his captain in the eye.

“You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish.”

He forgave the startled expression in Lancelot’s face, and took his hand once more.

“You will find,” he explained, “that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies, too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people. And naturally I want my people to have the new law, because then they are more prosperous, and I am more prosperous in consequence.”

These days, presidents wish to be kings in order to be free of all law.

All kings, it seems, are not created equal.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd:

The White House should hire an anthropologist.

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn’t understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

…

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that “mirroring” — assuming other cultures think like us — doesn’t work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama’s hiding place to the Hamas victory.

Bush officials keep claiming they couldn’t have anticipated disasters — from the terrorist attacks to Katrina — even when they got specific warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake nuclear threat in Iraq, they misplayed the real ones in Iran and North Korea. In London Sunday, Condi Rice admitted that all of our diplomats and spies were caught off guard by the Hamas win. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” she said. “It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.”

…

The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five oblivious years, about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton and Exxon are swimming in profits — Exxon’s revenues were bigger than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia or Indonesia — was rich.

A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq “a black hole.” The “spiraling security disaster,” she told Larry King, had robbed Iraqis of hope, “and by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse.”

But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East country — and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another — without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?