THEY REALLY DO WANT A KING

Yesterday I was listening to a re-broadcast of one of Mark "Foamer" Levin's shows and one of his caller's complained about Pres. Fredo, but not in the way you might think. The caller was critical of Fredo because he wasn't standing up enough to the other 2 branches of government. He wants Fredo to tell them to stuff it when they try to limit any of Fredo's actions. Foamer agreed and emphasized once again how the federal courts were out of control. This is a great example of the authoritarian personality and puts into perspective something I heard Andrew C. McCarthy say a few weeks ago on Slots Bennett's show.

McCarthy is a contributor to the National Review and the director of the Center for Law and Counterrorism at the (wingnut) Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He was also a Federal prosecutor. Slots and Bennett were discussing national security issues and McCarthy said that he'd like to get rid of FISA altogether because it was no longer needed. In McCarthy's world, politicians are now so honest that they would never condone actions outside the law. FISA is just a remnant of the reaction to the Nixon years.

Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker points out an article in the upcoming NY Times Sunday Magazine that talks about another lawyer who worked for the criminal Bush regime. It's a good article about how Fredo's Executive Branch has been trying to amass pre-Watergate power and I found this tidbit interesting:

“We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004. In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.

David Addington was Cheney's legal counsel and is now, with the resignation of the criminal Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. According to Jane Harman, "He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives." Colin Powell was reportedly more succinct: “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.”

So, we have a wingnut caller, a wingnut radio host who's also a lawyer, a former federal prosecutor and the Vice President's current chief of staff who all agree that the President should have nearly unlimited powers. These are NOT isolated or rare examples of the conservative mindset and should serve as a reminder of why these people are so dangerous to America.