Even some conservatives can’t get behind presidential law-breaking

In a long well considered post, Glenn Greenwald posits that the illegal wiretap scandal might be one that resists the usual tamping down by the Bush cult of personality (Breaking the Daou Cycle: Conservative opposition to Bush’s law-breaking):
> Former Bush loyalists are now, in droves, expressing discomfort or worse with George Bush generally and specifically with his claimed right to break the law, and that is something we have not seen before. It is a clear and hopeful deviation from the scandal-suffocating cycle described so astutely by Peter Daou.
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> Conservatives who still believe in something beyond George Bush ascribe, genuinely, to a belief in the rule of law and to real limitations on the powers of the Federal Government — the two principles most directly under assault by the Administration’s illegal conduct and by the accompanying Yooian theories of the Omnipotent Unchecked Executive who wields the right to break the law.
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> And beyond that, Americans of every ideological stripe have an instinctive aversion to political leaders who claim the right to break the law. That is not a naive aspiration. These are deeply ingrained political principles, drummed into us from the time we first attend school. Those are the values which pervade every discussion of “America,” the founding fathers, the Constitution. Even Americans who agree on nothing else know, even if only on the most submerged and basest levels, that what distinguishes America from other countries and what keeps us safe and secure in our liberty is that nobody, including the President, is above the law. People know that the claim that someone should be above the law is the mark of a tyrant claiming a power that is as arrogant and dangerous as it is un-American.