Contains sardonic political vitriol. Shielded for the sake of the childs; follow the jump or the link.
First off, the Justice Department said that the authority of the President as Commander-in-Chief trumps all other legal restraint on Presidential power.
Around the same time, they claimed that the Fourth Amendment didn’t apply to anti-terrorism policy.
“But Stagger Lee!” I hear you protest. “This was long ago! This was in a panic after September 11! This was a natural and understandable reaction to the panic of a terror attack on American soil! Any conservative would say the same!”
“Insight on the News,” by the way, is (was?) the weekly magazine of the Washington Times. Basically the house organ of the contemporary GOP. And yes – the professor quoted as saying that “under Clinton’s bill a teenager who shoots at a road sign with a .22-caliber rifle will have committed a terrorist act” is none other than the legendary Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.
So yeah – when the President in question was the ol’ Arkansas Traveller, it’s a “gestapo-empowerment bill.” But for the current guy, it’s OK to feed the Constitution into the chipper-shredder…except for Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1.
At some point, we’re going to need an actual conservative party in this country again. The one we have now got lost in a haze of pant-pissing fright and blind worship of retarded Texans. Until then, I strongly comment to you the website of The American Conservative, whose blog is frequently updated and is chock-a-block with people who have rejected Bush-worship, and all its pomps and works and empty promises, for an actual honest-to-Buckley approach to conservative politics that comes with logical rigor and reality checks.