Hullabaloo: From Spencer Ackerman at the New Republic via Hullabaloo:

"The Bush administration . . . is defending the idea that the Constitution empowers the president to conduct war exclusively on his terms. A series of memos written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 effectively maintained that any law restricting the president's commander-in-chief authority is presumptively unconstitutional. . . . .For the administration, its expansion of executive power is synonymous with victory in the war--regardless of the real-world costs to the war effort."



Bush really is trying to establish an authoritarian state, with the President as a dictator. The Constitution's separation of powers and civil liberties have been jettisoned, and the Administration fights tooth and nail anything from Congress or the Courts, which would challenge this assertion of untrammelled power. So far, the courts and Congress have been pretty subdued in their response. I don't think many really get how determined the Bushies are, on this point; many, I suspect, dismiss the criticism as partisanship.



If some kind of storm doesn't sweep this away, the Constituiton may actually be lost. And, that's no joke.