E Pluribus Unum

It's becoming clear that opposition to Bush's warrantless wiretapping is not at all a partisan thing. When you have Bob Barr and Al Gore joining forces against it, you know there is something more to this than the usual partisan bickering.

Only Bush's bed-wetting apoligists persist in seeing this as a politically-motivated attack on Dear Leader.

But as Glenn Greenwald said:

Bush followers are not conservative; they are devoted solely to the aggrandizement and glorification of George Bush. It is more of a personality cult than it is a political ideology. There is a strong anti-government sentiment which still runs deep in traditional conservatives – that is why Bob Barr and so many other actual conservatives have spoken out, in many cases more aggressively than Democrats have, against Bush’s lawless eavesdropping. Those fissures on the Right from this issue can be and should be exploited in order to prevent this scandal from being cast as the latest partisan bickering or as the by-product of liberal opposition to strong anti-terrorist measures.

And now this...

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights are suing the Bush administration in the first major court challenges to the warrantless eavesdropping program:

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy group.

Hitchens is one of those guys who, when they appear on TV, I stop what I'm doing to listen. And he never disappoints, alternating between infuriatingly sycophantic, brilliantly articulate, never boring and always a bomb thrower. He'll slice your head off with a Thurber-esque "touche" and never change expression.

I can't wait to see his next appearance on barking-head cable TV.