Glenn Greenwald has two posts up that really define what is happening in this country right now politically. The people destroying, and rooting on the destroyers, aren’t conservatives at all, they are bush cultists. As I pointed out yesterday he really nailed the reality of the bush defenders and today he addresses the inevitable firestorm from the bushcultists that resulted from his outing them. As he says, it was very thoughtful of them to provide such thorough proof of his original points.

The list of long-time conservatives who are the target of all sorts of attacks and decrees of excommunication when they criticize George Bush is long and growing, and if anything, my post was a defense of those conservatives rather than some claim that they do not exist. My post included multiple examples and there are countless more. The attacks don’t occur when they abandon conservatism. They occur when they dissent from the Bush Movement, which, in many — I’d argue most — cases, is not the same thing.

(4) None of the bloggers purporting to reply to the post addressed the fact that the arguments made by conservatives over the last three decades have been abandoned almost entirely and have been replaced by their precise antitheses — all in order to justify George Bush’s conduct. The principal example used was the angry opposition to warrant-based FISA eavesdropping voiced by conservatives under the Clinton Administration, as compared to the stirring defense of warrantless, oversight-less eavesdropping now engaged in proudly by the Bush Administration.

But beyond that specific, quite revealing instance is the general disappearance of an anti-federal-government ethos. Principles of a restrained federal government and distrust of that government — previously centerpieces of the conservative movement — have been discarded like yesterday’s trash in order to maintain praise of George Bush’s actions and to maximize the powers and reach of the Federal Government now that Bush controls it.

This is chilling because, as I pointed out previously concerning Gonzalez’s testimony before the Senate, it is about a cult of the Great Leader, not about American Constitutional Democracy, however imperfectly applied.

This really is dictator territory, much like the N. Korean official reverence for Kim Il Sung, or his son, Kim Jong Il.

Since when did America become a country that worships its leader at any expense rather than respecting its Constitution and holding its leadership accountable to it?