Why do you libs constantly confuse a difference of opinion as someone being criminal and evil? Why, also, do you libs, and you are libs, try to lie and say you aren't libs and that you are "journalists?"

...violating the constitution, made merely a "difference of opinion."

Because that "difference of opinion" caused the US to join the ranks of countries clearly committing torture and locking people up without evidence.

A difference of opinion is not criminal or evil, but violating the law is, by definition, criminal. And the Bush administration clearly violated both US and international law. Why do conservatives hate the constitution and America so much?

Pretend that this is Clinton instead of GWB and that it is Madeline Albright instead of Condi Rice.

Can you honestly say that telling the world that "we do not torture" is a lesser crime than "I did not have sex with that woman"?

The crime does not occur just in "telling the world that 'we do not torture'," it occurs in the torture itself.

Boomer

todji:

A difference of opinion is not criminal or evil, but violating the law is, by definition, criminal. And the Bush administration clearly violated both US and international law.

That's not as clear as you might like to think. There are different opinions on the subject, and the best predictor of any individual's opinion is his or her political alignment, not any apolitical approach to jurisprudence.

Guantanamo is not Dachau, Bush is not Hitler, and prosecuting members of his administration under laws designed to concompass the crimes of some of history's worst mass murderers would be a politically-motivated travesty - especially when you consider that there isn't one government in ten on this globe that hasn't done considerably worse things and gone unpunished.

Yet every time the Bush Administration takes their case to the Supreme Court, they lose. At some point, a thinking person might consider that if they are wrong that frequently, that maybe they knew it all along and just concocted some legal mumbo jumbo to cover their asses. That would be illegal.

Why are you comparing the Bush Administration to the Nazis (and then saying there is no comparison). There is no comparison between anyone and the Nazis so it seems like a rather specious argument.

So the guy who steals your car shouldn't be prosecuted because he didn't steal as much as Bernie Ebbers?

The US is also not the Third Reich. We have laws. We are a nation of laws. The POTUS is not above the law.

Are you arguing that the Nazis and Dachau are the standard, and if violoations of "the law" are not as bad as that of the Nazis or as horrifying as Dachau, they are not violations of"the law" after all?

It was a common jurisprudential question when I was in college: Was Nazi Germany a nation of laws, or was it lawless?

Interestingly enough, part of the problem with Nazi Germany was that they made that which was morally corrupt, highly anti-social, and evil, legal. The Nazis often legislated their depravity; making murder and oppression, discrimination and slavery legal, and much of what we consider to be that which is and should be protected by law to be illegal.

But in the case of telling Congress that "we do not torture" - there is a far greater violation than in telling the public at large "I did not have sex with that woman".