"Breaking Daou Cycle: Conservative Oppostion to Bush Law-Breaking!

[KoKo]

(Note to DU'ers who read the depressing Dou Cycle about why Repug Scandals don't ever gain traction, this upbeat article gives alot of hope! A must read for some great perspective!


Breaking the Daou Cycle: Conservative opposition to Bush's law-breaking
Sunday, January 01, 2006

Peter Daou’s recent description of the 10 steps which lead to the inconsequential fading away of every Bush scandal has received substantial attention, and deservedly so. When reading it, one can instinctively recognize that it accurately outlines how George Bush has survived scandal after scandal – including ones which, by themselves, would have sunk a President who was not protected by such an efficient scandal-repelling machine.

While Daou predicts that this cycle will similarly consign the NSA scandal to irrelevance, it is becoming clear that this scandal is actually deviating from Daou's cycle and, I believe, will continue to deviate even more as more facts are revealed. The cycle is primarily breaking down – not yet entirely, but already quite noticeably, and certainly much more so than ever before – at Daou's Steps 4 and 5 (where virtually all Republicans fall in line behind Bush and read from the Bush-defending script). The controversy arising from Bush's claimed power of law-breaking is plainly not ideologically-based, and as a result, there is nothing even close to unanimity of Republican opinion in defense of George Bush.

Quite the contrary. There are now aggressive criticisms of Bush’s conduct coming from his own party, and the criticisms are not confined to the standard, isolated, pseudo-maverick McCain/Hagel precincts. We are seeing not just widespread Republican discomfort in defending the President here, but affirmative criticisms of the President even from many of his most steadfast supporters, who are making clear that George Bush broke the law and has no right to do so.

What matters more than anything else is keeping the focus exclusively on what this scandal is about. This is not about eavesdropping, or warrants, or the Fourth Amendment, or privacy. This scandal raises all of those issues secondarily, but that is not what this scandal is about. This scandal matters so much because George Bush broke the law and is vowing to continue to break the law because his lawyers have created legal theories which contend that the President during "wartime" has the right to break the law. As both Digby and Mark Kleiman have noted, this scandal is -- from beginning to end -- about law-breaking and, more specifically, the fact that the President of the United States really is claiming the power to break the law, not just in this instance, but generally.

Much more with great links to other sites comments here.........
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/breaking-daou-cycle-conservative.html

[wryter2000]

1. Wow

I've never read that Daou cycle. The guy has nailed it!

[Strawman]

2. I think the most vulnerable link is Step 7

"7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion."

Bounce some "moderate" Senate and Congressional Dems in the 2006 primaries and you'll send a message to the rest. These people are newsmakers, not some obscure conservative figures or bloggers. Oh no, Bruce Fein and Paul at Powerline have flipped on this issue. So what? They only matter to close observers like us. They don't make the news that most voters watch. Hillary and Joe Biden do. Liberals need to scare the pants off of those people by sending some of their "moderate" colleagues to the unemployment line. Then and only then will they pursue these scandals beyond a meaningless soundbite of outrage that gets their mug on the news. then maybe that "critical mass" of public opinion against the regime can be sustained and turned into change.

The author is cherry picking a handful of GOP'ers that have strayed from the flock on this issue and seeing what he wants to see.

[enough]

3. I recommend the original Daou article also, short and to the point.

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=a6da2e05-c808-4f7e-9ab2-3d2a01a82a15

At Salon, but available without subscription.



Let's hope Greenwald is right about this.

snip> (from the OP-linked article)

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.

Those are the values under assault with the NSA scandal. Complex Fourth Amendment claims or counter-intuitive, legalistic arguments that abstract rights of privacy should trump our security are going to get Bush critics exactly nowhere. But emphasizing the universal and most deeply ingrained values which hold that we are a nation of laws and that nobody is above the law -- values which are even causing steadfast Bush supporters to criticize the Administration’s lawlessness here – clearly has the power to smash the Daou cycle. And the more it is emphasized that there are scores of non-liberals and non-partisans who are refusing to acquiesce to George Bush’s lawlessness, the more potent those arguments will be.

end of article>