Things like "torture" and "illegal eavesdropping" can't be compared as though they're separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.

Well worth repeating.

spying--> rendition--> torture--> secret prisons--> revelations/accountability--> spying on lawyers/journalists/whistleblowers--> begin the circle again, each time closer to home

Each single aspect justifies and necessitates the others. Within its own framework the logic is pure and inevitable. It is a roadmap to hell.

is genocide a policy? was the Second World War fought over policy differences? Should we simply have waited for Hitler to be voted out and sent back to the minor leagues? Is the Cold War now to be considered a big misunderstanding over policy differences? This calls for a major rewriting of history.

Was Saddam not deposed over policy differences?

Certainly, if it's just a smack to the head here and a wiretap there, the best and healthiest response to government overreach is to vote the perpetrators out. I guess the question is, when does torture (or domestic spying, or genocide, or ethnic cleansing) become routine enough to be considered policy?

Obviously, when dabbling in lawbreaking becomes standard operating procedure as laid out in memos and manuals---and laws passed by Congress---it's no longer dabbling. It's a policy of lawbreaking.

And if lawbreaking is policy---at any level of government---then how can that policy escape being criminal? Is the law just another flavor of ice cream?

Serious question:

Will Bush/Cheney ever be held legally accountable for their crimes?

...you would still RULE! Holy cow!

Amen.

One comes away with the knowlege that our system of Government was set up specifically to COUNTER the natural proclivity of humans left unchecked. The founders saw personal ambition and irrational fear as forces to be coralled and set against each other by the system of checks and balances.

It is unsurprising than that it is during times of stress that the Constitution and the Rule of Law are in the greatest danger.

Compounding the problem is what can only be referred to as Cheney's revenge for Nixon. Much of the what the administratrion has done has been specifically to undo the effects of the Church commission. The deliberate violation of FISA when the political capital was available to change it instead is a direct result of the Cheney/Addington project to resupremify the Presidency. Even the erasure of e-mails and the ignoring of subpeonas falls under the same effort.

Part of the problem with the FISA vote is that people just don't understand the stakes involved.

As always, thanks for your efforts to correct that problem....

I'm an old, old lady, and all my life I was told by my government and by the history books that the Nazis, the "Japs", the Russians, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans - they were the bad guys. They imprisoned people without cause, and then they tortured them.

We were th good guys. In peace and war we followed the laws and the rules of the the civilized world. We protected the innocent and we never, never, never tortured anybody.

It's painful for me to see the actual truth that while our past was not always totally pure, our present leaves no doubt that we are now definitely bad guys.

Our economic and political standing in the world is diminishing, but those losses are minor compared to our loss of moral leadership. I hope I live long enough to see that moral leadership restored.

I'm not sure how much more evidence we'll need before sanity is restored to our government. Maybe we really will need to face serious pressure from outside our borders. It's probably the best thing our allies could do--save us from ourselves.

Yes. The U.S. government from the President on down have approved and remain engaged in torture and other war crimes. Yes. FISA does now establish a U.S. police surveillance state. Yes. These actions are criminal under the rule of law and constitute crimes against humanity. Yes. The Democratic Congress has been and remains complicit in these criminal actions.

It is not open for debate.

Dear Glenn,

You make these arguments as well or better than most other contemporary writers. But, I would argue, the next logical step in your argument is to label this drift toward lawlessness in terms of its most important historical precedent: the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany after WW I. What we have in the US today is what I would call proto-fascism, the precursors of a more full-blown fascism that may well be on the way. I heartily recommend the following books: Robert O. Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" and Richard J. Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich", as well as Naomi Wolf's "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot".

Jim Bond

Not any longer. No longer a country under the rule of law.

And with a corporate media, what Bill Moyers has called the "fifth estate" that is part of the law breaking coverup, it will be a long time until the public realizes what has happened.

"Since Andrew Jackson's time, our electoral victors celebrate by throwing the losers out of work -- not into jail cells. "

Is this not exactly what has happened in Alabama under the Republicans there, assisted as always by Rove and his minions? The collapse of the rule of law is a vicious circle that will eventually spin out of control. With a Democrat-controlled federal government, what will prevent the inevitable reprisals against Republicans?

From my limited perspective, this whole mentality that the right is inherently good and should not be questioned really picked up steam when Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves nationally about 20 years or so ago. The incessent drumbeat he has maintained ever since has gone a long way towards desensitizing America to this whole issue of the rule of law. He and his ilk have so cheapend and degraded political conversation that many people no longer know the difference between rule of law and rule of men.