Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media critic, has a long piece today lamenting how dangerous it has become for journalists in war zones. He cites as examples the Gaza kidnapping of the two Fox journalists as well as yesterday's missile attack by the Israeli air force on an armored vehicle in Gaza (prominently marked "PRESS") which was carrying journalists from Reuters (the Israelis claim it was accidental). Kurtz solemnly notes that war journalists "risk their lives and put their families through great stress simply to tell the rest of us what is transpiring in faraway lands."

In addition to his Post column, Kurtz also hosts a CNN show called Reliable Sources, devoted to discussing the media. One of Kurtz's favorite guests is Powerline blogger John Hinderaker. Hinderaker wrote a post last night about the missile attack on the Reuters journalists and this is what he said (emphasis added):

Given Reuters's coverage of the conflict in Lebanon, it would perhaps be understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles. Which is what Reuters now says they did.

It would be "understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles." Why? Because of their "coverage of the conflict in Lebanon." Shouldn't someone who defends and justifies violent attacks on journalists because of what they write be considered out of the mainstream, too reprehensible to be given a CNN platform? Why would CNN want to put someone on its broadcasts who advocates violent attacks on journalists due to what they write? And if arguing that Reuters journalists are legitimate war targets who can and should be shot at doesn't render someone an untouchable right-wing extremist -- more accurately, a sociopath -- what would be sufficient to justify that characterization?

For whatever reasons, the media continues to be perfectly amiable with people, including Hinderaker, who advocate that journalists (such as the NYT's Jim Risen and even Kurtz's own colleague, the Post's Dana Priest) be imprisoned for the articles they write about the Bush administration. That's odd enough. But are they really going to continue to provide platforms to people like Hinderaker who explicitly justify violent attacks on journalists due to animosity towards their employers over the content of their journalism?

A federal district court this week ruled what has been evident for some time now -- that the President of the U.S. has been systematically breaking the law without any valid defense, and ruled further that his administration has been violating the constitutional rights of Americans. In response, most of the media and the "legal experts" they consult have been far more interested in pretentiously demeaning the quality of the Judge's written opinion -- as though what matters is to have law professors snidely grade the Judge's work -- than they are interested in the grave constitutional crisis our country faces as a result of a lawless presidency.

Harvard Law Professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has written a superb e-mail to New York Times reporter Adam Liptak (in response to Liptak's front-page Times story which focused not on the decision itself or what it means for the country, but instead, on the supposed consensus of "experts" that the opinion lacked "scholarly depth" and used language that was too strident and disrespectful in condemning the President). While Professor Tribe makes clear that he shares many of the technical, legalistic criticisms of the court's written opinion, he eloquently points out that compared to the radical law-breaking of the Bush administration -- which the court correctly ruled is without any legal justification whatsoever -- such criticisms are petty and even inconsequential. As Tribe notes: "while her reasoning is bound not to be embraced, her bottom line [that the President broke the law and violated Americans' constitutional rights] is very likely to survive appellate review" (emphasis added).

I have been objecting for the last three days to this obsessive and patronizing focus on the alleged "lack of scholarship" of the Judge's opinion. Such petty critiques serve only to obscure the real dangers posed by a law-breaking president and to enhance the egos and bloated self-satisfaction of these harping law professors, editorialists and pundits who appear palpably indifferent to systematic presidential criminality. Professor Tribe makes this point perfectly:

My point isn't that judges who play the role Judge Taylor did should never be held to account for the shoddy quality of their legal analysis; of course they should, especially in the context of sober second thoughts offered in law reviews and other scholarly venues. But it's those with constitutional blood on their hands who deserve to be chastized most insistently in the public press, and it seems to me something of an indulgence to spend so much time complaining in the media that the judge who called foul used some ill-chosen rhetoric, and that she stuttered and sputtered a bit more than necessary, when the principal effects might well be to underscore one's own professional credentials and one's cleverness and even-handedness and fair-mindedness at the expense of distracting the general public from the far more important conclusion that the nation's chief executive has been guilty of a shamelessly unlawful power grab.

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For almost two years now, polls have continuously shown (.pdf) that a solid majority of Americans opposes the war in Iraq -- the signature policy of the Bush administration and its followers -- and believes it was a mistake. But a new analysis of Gallup poll data (to which John refers below) reveals that opposition to the war isn't just substantial, but is greater than it was for the Korean War, and roughly equal to the opposition Americans expressed towards the Vietnam War even as late as 1970:

An analysis released today by Frank Newport, director of The Gallup Poll, shows that current public wishes for U.S. policy in the Iraq war eerily echo attitudes about the Vietnam war in 1970.

The most recent Gallup poll this month found that 52% of adult Americans want to see all U.S. troops out of Iraq within a year, with 19% advocating immediate withdrawal. In the summer of 1970, Gallup found that 48% wanted a pullout within a year, with 23% embracing the “immediate” option. Just 7% want to send more troops now, vs. 10% then.

At present, 56% call the decision to invade Iraq a “mistake,” with 41% disagreeing. Again this echoes the view of the Vietnam war in 1970, when that exact same number, 56%, in May 1970 called it a mistake in a Gallup poll.

Polling data such as this conclusively demonstrates -- in a way that even the national media can no longer ignore -- just how dishonest and corrupt has been the favorite tactic of pro-war Bush followers: namely, to depict their pro-war views as "mainstream," while even more loudly characterizing truly mainstream anti-war views as being fringe, radical and anti-American.

Indeed, right-wing pundits such as Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds have spent the last several years misleadingly equating opposition to the war with being a fringe, radical leftist, while depicting pro-war views as a prerequisite to being considered in the mainstream. Or, as Reynolds put it when describing anti-war protestors: "They're not so much "antiwar" as just on the other side" and Ward Churchill is "the authentic face of the left."

(And just incidentally, but also quite revealingly, Reynolds' "credibility" -- to the extent such a thing still exists -- suffered some rather piercing and well-deserved blows again this weekend; if the mild-mannered Josh Marshall accuses someone of "being willfully dishonest and quite consciously lying" -- as Marshall quite justifiably accused Instapundit this weekend -- that's a pretty good sign that the person is lacking in the integrity department, to put it generously).

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The full extent and irreversibility of the damage to our country wrought by the Bush administration will likely not be known until well after George Bush finally disappears from our political life. But understanding the dynamics and impulses of the movement which have enabled these abuses is a critically important task, and that is the project undertaken by John Dean's new best-selling book, Conservatives Without Conscience (selected excerpt is here). Fortuitously for Dean, this examination of what has become the so-called "conservative" movement (composed of Bush followers, neoconservatives and hard-core religious conservatives) comes at the perfect time.

With 2 1/2 years still left for this administration, the true radicalism of the administration and its followers has become unavoidably, depressingly clear, and it is equally clear that this movement has not reached anywhere near the peak of its extremism. Dean's central thesis explains why that is so.

Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement.

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This week, I wrote a post documenting the increasingly pervasive use and endorsement of treason accusations and violence-inciting rhetoric in the right-wing blogosphere, including among its most well-read bloggers, such as Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, and Powerline's John Hinderaker. Media Matters also posted a long list of examples of the extremist rhetoric which has become commonplace among right-wing bloggers. And even prominent conservative bloggers, such as Time Magazine's Andrew Sullivan, noted this week "how the far-right blogosphere has jumped the rhetorical shark this past year, aided and abetted by more mainstream conservative bloggers."

As I documented in my post, while the national media has written endlessly about even the pettiest details of the liberal blogosphere, it has studiously ignored the increasingly deranged and violence-drenched rhetoric which has become the a staple of the right-wing blogosphere. Media Matters similarly documented that the "vitriol, hate, and even threats of physical violence by conservative bloggers draw comparatively little attention." And Sullivan agreed that the extremist rhetoric in the right-wing blogosphere is "overdue for media attention."

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