Who will bring Bush to justice?

So Bill Frist is upset that Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure* the Worst President Ever (tm) over the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens. Frist, echoing the tired refrain issued on their morning talking points, rests his argument on the oh-so-lame defense that we shouldn't criticize the President in time of war. Here's Frist:

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, called the measure "a political stunt that is addressed at attacking the president of the United States of America when we're at war."

Now, since we're apparently in an open-ended and endless war, it will never be safe to criticize the President again. I see reasoning such as Frist's as another marker of the Imperial Presidency, where criticism becomes disloyalty and opposition becomes treason. In fact, treason is the term that Ann Coulter, the vapid spokesperson for unreason, uses to describe opposition to the Dear Leader's goals. Then again, Ann Coulter argued that we should "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Simple, brutish, and utterly unrealistic -- a good definition of conservatism.

Frist isn't alone in his obsession with the idea that the administration my do whatever it likes in the face of a (very conveniently) nebulous foe:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) called Feingold's resolution "political grandstanding of the very worst kind," which exposes "the soft underbelly of the Democrats' positions on national security issues."

So the Democrats are soft on national security because they're adhering to the rule of law (a phrase that meant so much to Republicans in Florida in 2000) and expect the Executive Branch to function within the relatively broad framework of the US Constitution. If protecting our rights against overzealous ineffective witch-hunters meansbeing soft on national security issues, then I'll take the softness. After all, I'd prefer not to live under a nascent police state.

And then there's Arlen Specter, the lesser of the two Senatorial evils from Pennsylvania, who hedges his bets with a good non-committal say nothing response:

If administration officials like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are correct,
Specter said, "then there is no violation of law by the president."

Oh, that's brilliant. Let's rely on the Executive Branch to police itself. Let torture advocate Alberto "Rubber Hose" Gonzales be your moral guide on this issue. It's a bit like saying, "If O.J. is correct, then there is another killer out there."

The Nation this week has a nice little piece on Pete McCloskey, who was the first Republican member of Congress to call for Nixon's impeachment back in the day. Incidentally, the country at that time was facing the tail end of the Vietnam War, and Nixon's status as a wartime President didn't help him in the end.

*thanks to RCR for seeing I'd transposed "censor" for "censure."