How it goes together

I've been pondering the President's insistence on continuing a course of behavior that, according to a growing number of people from all over the political spectrum, is criminal and in direct violation of the Constitution. When Fox"News"'s own legal analyst says that "the president has violated the law", you know that a critical line has been crossed. According to Newsweek, Bush tried to kill the story before it hit print, and Newsweek even goes as far as to use the word "impeachement":

This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

I won't go further into that, except to say that I hope the media and Congress do not let this go. We know that some members of Congress had been briefed on this issue, and while some of them may have valid excuses for not coming forward, in my mind the fact that they kept quiet in no way absolves Bush of responsibility - it just makes them complicit in the crime.

But there's a deeper point here, one brought out by Lindsay Graham's comments earlier this week. While "outcome-based" might be an intriguing phrase, the more common version is "the ends justify the means." The Evil and Greedy wings (E&G) of conservatism clearly operate under this philosophy - to them no means are too extreme if the end is achieved. You look at how they campaign - smear tactics, lies, innuendo - and you see that it's never about ideas, it's about winning. You look at how they govern - lying, rewarding their friends while punishing their enemies or ignoring the weak, making promises that they can't keep, and coalescing power in as few hands as possible. Now, one might argue (if they, say, were on LSD, had been kicked in the head by a horse, waterboarded, and subjected to the entire collected works of Scott McClellan) that these actions were taken "with the best intentions" - there are those, I'm sure, that believe that trickle down economics really works, or that they're really saving people's souls by going on religious crusades, or whatever.

However, we all know how dangerous this is. Ask the wingnuts how they'd feel if, say, Bill Clinton, had assumed that he had this power in a similar situation. They'd be screaming up one side and down the other about the abuses to their freedoms. Freedom isn't a sometimes thing. It's not something that we get to set aside when inconvenient. The Constitution is vague about some things, but not about this. "Congress shall make no law". "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated". And it's not me saying this. Decades of Supreme Court rulings clearly mark the boundaries of executive power.

"A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

So, sorry, Mr. President, the ends do not justify the means. If you save my life, but take away my freedom, you, sir, are unAmerican. You, sir, are in violation of your oath of office. You, sir, are nothing but a criminal.