Will real conservatives please stand up?

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Almost from the first, President Bush has acted as if there would never be another election. That’s the main thing adepts of the cult of personality surrounding this arrogant, befuddled little man love about him. “As his supporters saw him,” Sidney Blumenthal writes in his bracing new book, “How Bush Rules,” “ his simplistic rhetoric was straight talk, his dogmatism fortitude, his swagger reassuring, his stubbornness... a bulwark against danger, and his rough edges proof that he was a man of the people. ” What most Americans have appeared reluctant to grasp, Blumenthal thinks, is the radical extremism behind the administration’s concept of the “unitary executive” —seizing upon the metaphorical war on terror to declare the commander-inchief above the strictures of the U. S. Constitution and unfettered by whatever limitations a timorous Congress might seek to impose. By and large, the rubber-stamp Republican House and Senate have imposed none. On critical issues, the so-called GOP moderates and mavericks have feigned resistance, then gone along for the ride. Last month’s shameless capitulation allowing Bush to strip “enemy combatants” —American citizens included—of the right to challenge their imprisonment in court was a dramatic example.