It seems to me that looking at the most-alarmist writings of the incumbent political party's ideological adversaries and noting that their concerns seem overstated is a solid "evergreen" story idea, so I don't bregrudge Noemie Emery and The Weekly Standard for taking a stab at it. But as Gene Healy notes she sure did pick a strange lede:





The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit.





This is the kind of thing that gets people nervous.



Meanwhile, I would note that whether or not one thinks it likely that Bush will start ordering his political opponents to be not so much put "in jail" as abducted off the streets and then held incommunicado in secret foreign facilities for an indefinite span of time during which they'll be tortured until, eventually, their coerced confessions as used as evidence for never releasing them, the point I would make is that Bush really has asserted his constitutional right to do this and the main opinion leaders on the right have agreed that there should be no meaningful constraint on his ability to behave in this manner.

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