The rawest explanation of the core principles of the new conservatism to date is laid bare in yesterday's Wall Street Journal opinion pages.

Let me give you an idea of how this is gonna go. Here are the fifth and sixth sentences from this abomination, authored by Harvard professor and Claremont Institute fellow Harvey C. Mansfield:

Though I want to defend the strong executive, I mainly intend to step back from that defense to show why the debate between the strong executive and its adversary, the rule of law, is necessary, good and--under the Constitution--never-ending. In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law.

Ohhhhh boy. What do you even say to something that starts off on that foot?

Well, I frequently find that when you're staring at the work of a psychopath who's too far gone to even begin addressing rationally, it turns out that Glenn Greenwald is already on the case. And thank God for that! I haven't got the stomach for it, myself. Take it away (please!), Glenn:

[R]eading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based. And that is Mansfield's value; he is a clear and honest embodiment of what the Bush movement is. In particular, he makes crystal clear that the so-called devotion to a "strong executive" by the Bush administration and the movement which supports it is nothing more than a belief that the Leader has the power to disregard, violate, and remain above the rule of law. And that is clear because Mansfied explicitly says that. And that is not just Mansfield's idiosyncratic belief. He is simply stating -- honestly and clearly -- the necessary premises of the model of the Omnipotent Presidency which has taken root under the Bush presidency.

The Nixon Doctrine. "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

This is why, when Alberto Gonzales last appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I thought that one of the most important questions that could be put to him on the subject of the day was: Given that it's his contention that nothing "improper" happened, is it even possible for something the president does to be "improper" at all?

This is, in case it's not obvious from the breathtaking scope of Mansfield's pronouncement, something that applies across the board. Asking Gonzales about whether or not anything could be improper in the scandal surrounding the dismissal of the U.S. Attorneys is small potatoes. I originally felt the question had to be asked of Gonzales when he baffled Senator Russ Feingold with his answers about the "administration's" program of domestic surveillance. Feingold thought Gonzales had lied in his confirmation hearing, but I thought he had just been engaging in wordplay:

Not only is he saying that no law can be passed that infringes upon the president's "inherent authority," he is saying that he told the truth in his confirmation hearings because he believes the surveillance programs do not violate the law because they cannot violate the law. That's why he regarded Senator Feingold's question as a hypothetical. Because it was and is his assumption that no program initiated by the president in furtherance of the national security could be in violation of the law.

And, sure enough, Mansfield was on the scene with another article, making a similar argument about Bush's domestic spying. Greenwald continues:

In that article, Mansfied claimed, among other things, that our "enemies, being extra-legal, need to be faced with extra-legal force"; that the "Office of President" is "larger than the law"; that "the rule of law is not enough to run a government"; that "ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion"; that "with one person in charge we can have both secrecy and responsibility"; and most of all: Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply. "Law does not apply" -- that is Mansfield's belief, and the belief of the Bush movement.

Really, you should just go read Glenn's post. There's so much more to it than it's reasonable to reprint here. But I'll just leave you with this important observation:

The point here is not to spend much time arguing that Mansfield's authoritarian cravings are repugnant to our political traditions. The real point is that Mansfield's mindset is the mindset of the Bush movement, of the right-wing extremists who have taken over the Republican Party and governed our country completely outside of the rule of law for the last six years. Mansfield makes these arguments more honestly and more explicitly, but there is nothing unusual or uncommon about him. He is simply expounding the belief in tyrannical lawlessness on which the Bush movement (soon to be led by someone else, but otherwise unchanged) is fundamentally based.

This is why he is published in The Weekly Standard and The Wall St. Journal -- the two most influential organs for so-called "conservative" political thought. All sorts of the most political influential people in our country -- from Dick Cheney to Richard Posner to John Yoo and The Weekly Standard -- believe and have argued for exactly this vision of government. They literally do not believe in our constitutional framework and our most defining political values.

And his equally important conclusion, found in an update:

UPDATE: I just want to add one related point here. Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments -- the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard -- receive almost no attention. While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President's will, our media still barely discusses those issues. They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

One last thing I can't resist, though it might be interpreted as a dig at Greenwald, so before I mention it, let me just say that I have only the highest respect for him, and that the fact that he takes on tasks I couldn't bear to contemplate is part of what keeps me getting out of bed in the morning.

But let me just remind you of how far into the abyss this "administration" has dragged us. Here's Greenwald nearly a year ago, answering reactions to the Hamdan case put forward by, well, people like me, who've believed for a long time that the Bushbots were insane:

That means that the administration has no defenses to fend off charges that they deliberately violated the criminal law -- and continue to do so -- by eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, or torturing people in violation of the Geneva Conventions and/or the McCain Amendment, or violating the National Security Act of 1947 by concealing major intelligence activities from Congress. Those are criminal offenses. And the Supreme Court just expressed unbridled hostility towards their only defenses they have to those crimes. Anyone who suggests that that is a meaningless development and that Bush officials are unaffected by them has embraced a cartoon super-villain version of the administration which is just not real.

I guess it might be time to rethink that.