Executive privilege exists for legal behavior, not for illegal actions. The democrats are complicit in ignoring this fact, as is the news media.

Not since the Civil War have so many Americans betrayed the United States.

The best that can be said about the Confederacy is that it fought for a way of life, (despicable as some of that life's customs were,) but those who betray America today do so for status and money, for which there is no excuse.

Shooter, I regret to inform you that, whatever you think, we ARE considered the worst nation in the world by a wide margin to those of us not so addled by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh as you are. All over the world, polls show that outside the US we are despised because of people like you.

Didn't you think it was funny that you had to list seven countries to come close to piling up the abuses we've committed in the last seven years?

While the Bushies haven't quite gotten around to the genocide many of their followers clearly long for when it comes to Muslims, this is more a matter of ineptitude, venality, and laziness than moral restraint.

The only real difference between the Neocons and the Nazis is competence. The Neocons can't find their ass with both hands and a flashlight. They're all Goebbels and no Speer.

The Nazis actually backed up their evil intent with a string of successes; that's the only difference.

CIA tapes aren't the only thing George Bush is missing!

Actually, it's even worse than you suggest. The legal monstrosities that Senator Whitehouse described were not parts of the Protect America Act. They were actually opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice and as such are generally regarded as the binding legal opinion of the US Department of Justice.

Whitehouse did not provide dates for the opinions he was describing. I haven't read what others are saying about this yet this morning, but after some thought on the issue overnight, I can't help but think that these opinions must be related the the Comey/Ashcroft/Gonzales hospital showdown. My guess is that Comey had determined that whatever program was going on was in violation of previous executive orders. The set of three orders Whitehouse describes then become the "work-around" that Bush and Gonzales came up with and then dictated to a compliant OLC so that Bush's breaking of previous executive orders magically became either waivers of, or alterations to, those orders, his illegal actions became legal simply because he said so and, most disgusting of all, legal interpretations by his toady counsel Gonzales suddenly became binding on the entire Department of Justice (and by extension, on the entire nation). This is nothing short of a coup d'etat and should be the basis for immediate impeachment.

This rot has spread so deeply that no one in any branch of this mal-administration has clean hands.

Forget Justice. No one's home.

I nominate John Dean. Man, wouldn't that be a trip?

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only

temporary; the evil it does is permanent. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Shooter, I regret to inform you that, whatever you think, we ARE considered the worst nation in the world by a wide margin to those of us not so addled by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh as you are.

If that's the case, it would behoove us to emulate those countries loved by the rest of the world, like the ones I listed. Which one do you think we should strive to be like?

So there we have it. We, the United States of America are the worst nation in the world, equivalent to Nazi Germany. But no, I can hear you say, it's just the Bush administration. Sorry but the failure of the German people to oust Nazis is part of the overall evil just as Democrat acquiescence here allows said evil to "flourish".

But let's go back to America as the worst and only example of Nazi behavior in the world. We are more evil than say....

* Russia, who kills off dissenting journalists and imprisons competing candidates to Putin (Kasparov),

* Venezuela, where police fire live bullets into demonstrations against Chavez,

* Saudi Arabia, a monarchy, where a victim of gang rape is convicted of sitting in a car with a non family member,

* Zimbabwe, were people are starved to death and dissent is literally killed,

* China, where dissent is jailed and information censored,

* Sudan, where genocide is reality,

* Myanmar, ruled by military, where monks are killed?

Gosh, we are worse than those countries? It must be so, we are hated more than they are. Which of those regimes should we emulate to escape our place at the bottom of the human rights list? Oh woe is us, oh woe is us.

-- shooter242

Paul Dirks is partly correct:

Shooter lists off a bunch of countries that engage in human rights abuses and then explains that we're different because.....well he doesn't actually explain why we're different, he simply takes it as a given.

He thus proves the point he's trying to refute. If there aren't mechanisms in place to PREVENT human rights abuses then they're going to happen. Yes - even here.

The magical thinking that America is different or is somehow doing God's will is, needless to say, the exact mechanism those other countries use to justify their own evil.

Goodwin can go jump. Evil is evil.

But there is one major difference. With the exception of China in Tibet, none of those countries has its military occupying foreign soil after invading and making war on false pretenses. And that never happened in Venezuela. In fact, it was armed anti-Chavistas that killed four Venezuelan police but Shooter is just as keen on taking a swipe at his real enemy, social and economic justice wherever he sees it. OTOH, as I said before, comparisons of the Neocons to Nazis is just inaccurate and imprecise. You really should call them Neocolonialists because that is what they are. And the list does provide a better example of a few actual police states for Achey-Achey-Headachey. Prison population alone is a poor metric.

There is still much debate over what constitutes a police state but it current consensus defines it as any state in which the government exercises "rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population, especially by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional republic."