Giving "Hitler" the power to take away your civil liberties

Ok, via Ed Brayton, here's Nat Hentoff on the Bush administration attempting to pass onto the next president J. Edgar Hoover era power to spy on American citizens.

Finished reading? Ok, then. Here is Media Matters on the latest comparison of Obama and Nazis.

Summary: In her online column, The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan wrote that Sen. Barack Obama's DNC speech at Denver's Invesco Field "has every possibility of looking like a Nuremberg rally." Other conservative pundits have made references to Nazis when talking about Obama or discussing his speeches, including radio host Tom Sullivan, who once aired what he called a "side-by-side comparison" of an Adolf Hitler speech and an Obama speech.

See, this is the sort of nonsense that is going to strain our constitutional form of governance. Pseudo-conservatives are willing to invest their Leader with limitless power and authority to act above and beyond American law. Yet they view any non-movement leadership as by definition illigitimate and as Evil that can not be trusted with power at all. Which is part of the dynamic that sends the extremist fringes of the conservative movement off into the woods to stockpile weapons and prepare to wage war with the "Liberal Fascist" Hitler.

As I've said before, however, they are not the real threat to our democracy. The real threat is that "rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible" because of a Republican noise machine that will work non-stop to undermine and attack any governance at all that isn't controlled by the conservative movement.

The terrible irony is is that the same pundits who'll be worried about liberty being taken away by a Democratic president are the same pundits who accuse Democrats of being "weak" on terror for not endorsing the Bush administration's expansion of the national surveillance state.