I was actually amused by the Democrats who said they would oppose Michael B. Mukasey appointment as AG because of his response to waterboarding issue.

What Mukasey response was that he would have the issue reviewed for legal opinion.

The Democrats wanted him to say it was illegal.

Seems the Democrats think that the role of the AG is to determine what the law IS and not just uphold the law.

If the Democrats oppose the use of waterboarding and want an AG to uphold the law, then they should be passing the law thru congress to make waterboarding illegal.

It's not the AG's postion to make laws, his role is to simply uphold the law's that Congress passes

Just a couple of observations:

Asked by reporters Sunday why it’s taken so long for clarification Clinton admitted she “wasn’t as clear as [she] should have been” but added, “I broadly support what governors like Elliot Spitzer are trying to do.”

So, Hillary Clinton IS in favor of issuing drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. This needs to be in every GOP ad.

“But finally I do not believe we can resolve this problem unless we bring people out of the shadows,” Clinton said,

I live in AZ and I can assure you that the illegals are NOT in the shadows. In fact they march down the street in broad daylight and protest our restrictive laws. They feel emboldened to do this because they have pawns, like Hillary, who want to give them drivers licenses.

Neocon,

As I've said, immigration/border security is the underground issue of 2008 which will, I think, change the entire dynamic of the race. Especially as Iraq becomes less of an issue, immigration will come to the forefront. The Democrat will want to talk healthcare and what a horrible man President Bush is...but in order to win, the Democrat will have to carry a few States that GW carried, twice...and that will be impossible if the Democrat isn't fully committed to strict enforcement of immigration laws.

Doug,

Plain and simple, the opposition to President is Bush is based on the notion that if Bush does it, it must be wrong...there's no sense or logic or rhyme or reason behind Democratic opposition. If President Bush came out in favor of late term abortions tommorrow, his Democrat opponents would come out against it.

"The name Dick Cheney, my cousin, will not appear on the ballot," Obama said. "We had been trying to hide that cousin thing for a long time. Everybody's got a black sheep in the family. A crazy uncle in the attic."

The Democrats apparently will have to learn the hard way, that rhetoric used to appease the far left will be their undoing in the general election. The vast majority of the voting public have grown tired of their devisive rhetoric and their pessimism.

Clinton admitted she “wasn’t as clear as [she] should have been” but added, “I broadly support what governors like Elliot Spitzer are trying to do.”

Help us out here leftists. What does she mean?

Does she support drivers licenses for illegals or doesn't she?

This sounds like another rhetorical contortion which permits her to have it both ways. She permits the listener to interpret what she meant. Some will say she supports drivers license for illegals. Others will say she is against drivers licenses for illegal but supports Spitzer's efforts to solve the problem. (Which is just another way of saying she supports drivers licenses for illegals without actually saying it.)

This is Hillary at her best, coming out with a statement that can be interpretted either way. So she can stand on opposite sides of the same issue.

Is this who you want to be President?

You may not like Bush, but at least you know where he stands.

She says she wants to be more nuanced. Gee, who has said that that before? Nuanced? Isn't that a sophisticated way to say "good at lying"?

Plain and simple, the opposition to President is Bush is based on the notion that if Bush does it, it must be wrong...there's no sense or logic or rhyme or reason behind Democratic opposition. If President Bush came out in favor of late term abortions tommorrow, his Democrat opponents would come out against it.

Oh, please. That is really desperate. Having lived in Texas during the Bush governorship, I think I can say I've had ample opportunity to observe how the man works. To whatever degree he was simply persuaded by Vice-President Cheney's Watergate-influenced views or they were native to his own personality, President Bush has demonstrated a radical (which is a non-judgmental adjective) exercise of power in the office he temporarily holds in trust.

There are some number of people in and out of government who both understand his radicalism and approve of it, but it is simply naive to believe that this is any kind of large number of Americans. George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have exercised a form of the relationship of the Presidency to the other branches that is far outside the norm in the history of the United States. You may personally understand and enthusiastically endorse it, but please don't burden us with your patronizing comments about those of us who both understand and completely reject the notion of the "unitary executive".

One of the common slanders against those you like to snidely refer to as "leftys" on your blog is that they live in some airy, fairy world removed from that of hard-nosed realists like Jonah Goldberg:

I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

However, that's the same kind of thinking that allows people to, from a distance instead of up close and personal like then-acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, declare that waterboarding is some kind of coddle for "terrorists" (because it's not possible that the authorities could ever possibly use "enhanced interrogation" against some innocent by mistake or, if they did, it's "breaking a few eggs to make omelets"). There are a number of conservatives, in the classic sense, who also don't agree with the actions of this president because they have a clear-eyed view of what his administration has actually done, such as run up huge deficits, when long-standing conservative principles abhor such practices. To claim that opposition to President George W. Bush is just some illogical personal animus is ignoring the fact that he has real opponents. They may be incorrect in their logic or their read of history just as you, if you were intellectually honest with yourself, may be in yours, but they just might be both patriots and correct.

House Republicans on Tuesday prevented Democratic leaders from blocking a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. The vote to table the privileged resolution, offered by Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinch, began as a largely party-line vote to kill the measure, but Republicans developed a strategy to force Democrats to debate the resolution by supporting Kucinich. GOP leaders felt as though it was in their interest to debate the measure because it would make Democrats look bad.

Maybe, just maybe, the GOP is growing a spine.

Diane,

No, I'm afraid that after more than four years writing on this blog and being exposed to a very large amount of leftwing opinion that I will stick to my view that the opposition to Bush is not based in facts or logic...it is based entirely upon emotion; and that emotion is hatred...the hatred, in turn, stems from a really rather unreasonable anger over then-President Elect Bush preventing Gore from recounting the Florida ballots in ever stranger manner until it came out the way he wanted.

To give you a for-instance, a reasonable dissent from Bush's current policy in Iraq would be along the lines of, "I believe we should start to withdraw our troops in order to rest and refit in case they are needed for the growing crisis in Iran". Dissent that is based entirely upon emotional hatred of President Bush goes "Iraq is a debacle and we must pull out right now".

Mark,

Thank you for your response. I'd have appreciated you spelling my name correctly, but there it is...

So, taking you at your word, your response then is based really on your interpretation of those who comment on your blog here and not on the overall universe of principled opposition to this President by people such as Bob Barr, Patrick Buchanan and John Dean.

To claim that opposition to President George W. Bush is just some illogical personal animus is ignoring the fact that he has real opponents.

Well, it's an easy escape hatch. Instead of actually having to defend positions, he can just say, "Oh, that's just Bush hatred" and pretend that he's answered the criticism. Sure beats thinking, right? Just look at one of the examples he gave:

Dissent that is based entirely upon emotional hatred of President Bush goes "Iraq is a debacle and we must pull out right now".

He actually thinks that if somebody looks at the Iraq situation and sees a debacle from which we would do well to remove ourselves, that opinion can be completely attributed to "hatred of President Bush" and absolutely nothing else. In doing so, he avoids having to take an honest look at Iraq and maybe, just maybe, seeing what a mess it is.

Also, bear in mind that Mark believes Bush has not told "lie the first" (the ungainly phrasing--entirely Mark's--is an attempt to make it sound more regal) and has, in fact, run the most honest administration in recent history. So he's not exactly approaching any of this with any sort of intellectual honesty.