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But never mind. Believe it or not, these aren’t the important reasons why Bush is a catastrophically bad president. You might even approve of all of those actions and still fear the man, because he really does believe that being president is a lot like being, well, king. And if his belief is institutionalized, sooner or later a liberal Democrat will reach the throne, and then what?

“The National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal is not an isolated act of lawbreaking,” he writes. “It is an outgrowth of an ideology of lawlessness that has been adopted by the Bush administration as its governing doctrine. Others include the incarceration in military prisons of U.S. citizens who were not charged with any crime or even allowed access to a lawyer, the use of legally prohibited torture techniques, and the establishment of a military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, a no-man’s-land that the administration claims is beyond the reach of U.S. law. In the media and the public mind, these issues have been seen in isolation, as though they are unconnected.