Some conservatives take on conservatives

Personally, I find Tucker Carlson annoying, but will concede that he is light years ahead of the other prominent conservative talking heads (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and that snake-Hannity). Occasionally, he makes a good point. This blog is one of those, though many of my readers will object (correctly) to his characterization about Indian gaming. But his point about conservatives and their "principles" is dead on. " Weirdos and charlatans and self-interested hacks like Lou Sheldon and Grover Norquist have long discredited the conservative ideas they purport to represent. Their political allies in Washington and Congress may be tempted to defend them. I hope they don't. We'll all be better off when they're gone."

And since I seem to be citing conservatives, here is another. Andrew Sullivan actually supports the expansion of the evesdropping, but questions the President's desire to divide and push the constitutional envelope--especially when he clearly didn't have to.

"It's clear now that 9/11 was seen by Cheney and Rumsfeld not simply as a catastrophe but as an opportunity. Just as Karl Rove shrewdly exploited the war to divide and defeat the Democrats, so Cheney and Rummy saw a chance to reverse decades of post-Vietnam executive branch erosion.

The war against terror, they argued, was an opportunity to insist the president was answerable to no court and no legislature in war-making. If he found laws that inhibited his range of action, he could simply ignore them. As commander-in-chief he wasn't so much above the law as he was the law. The brightest legal stars in the conservative intelligentsia were drafted to write legal memos justifying an extraordinary expansion of presidential power. He could ignore any treaties; he could violate any US law; he could upend decades of military justice; he could tell the UN to stuff it. And he did.

If you wonder how the US military got away with violating American law and torturing detainees in secret sites, wonder no longer. In wartime, Bush's lawyer John Yoo argued, the president could authorise the torture of anyone. In a recent debate at Notre Dame University, Yoo even claimed no treaty or law could definitively prevent the president from authorising the torture of a terrorist's child if he thought it was necessary for national security. If the president could legally and constitutionally do that, wiretapping American citizens is a no-brainer."

*****

Speaking of spying, as wasp jerky pointed out in my comments: "Speaking of the President spying, it seems that NBC may be investigating whether or not a CNN reporter was spied on. It's all very conjectural at this point, but I wouldn't put it past these guys."

Think about it: our president spying on our own media--all without a warrant or judicial oversight. Back when conservatives had principles, they would have opposed this.