Please allow Liz Cheney another inch of rope

Because Congressional Republicans goosestep across our television screens and throughout our printed pages in the tightest of political formulations, an appearance of unshakable right-wing unity dominates the national scene.

Yet it is well to remember that not all is ideological bliss within greater ultraconservative circles. The RNC, for instance, is in laughably disuniting freefall; Tea Partyers continue to exacerbate the right's preexisting condition of genetic drift; and now we see another rift opening on the right, headlined in yesterday's NY Times as "Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives."

These attacks, as you know, have been spearheaded by Just-give-me-enough-rope Liz Cheney and her plucky little propaganda mill of Keep America Safe, which, as you also know, have, in the scurrilous spirit of Joe McCarthy and A. Mitchell Palmer, "questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects."

These attacks, this questioning, indeed the entire Cheney humbuggery has been roundly denounced in and by the mainstream media; but, reports the Times, they've also "split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society ... have vehemently criticized" Ms. Cheney and her tactics, saying they violate the fundamental "American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer."

How fundamental? Ms. Cheney's former law professor and mentor, Richard Epstein, of the University of Chicago, said bluntly that her extermination of principle is "something truly bizarre." Added Epstein, with either a dram of disingenuity or buckets of political naivete: "I don’t know what moves her on this thing."

Well, Richard, let's just call it irrational exuberance, upon which a veritable "Who’s Who of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures" -- including even the legally creative Ken Starr and several Bush II officials -- are heaping intellectual piles of abuse. On Sunday, these conservative Who's Who-ers publicly signed a Brookings Institution letter that sternly reproached Ms. Cheney & Co. as "shameful," "unjust," and "destructive."

Needless to say, some notable Bush IIers were elsewhere; that is, in characteristic disaccord with legal tradition and Constitutional wisdom. My favorite Cheney-defense came from -- who else? -- John Yoo, whom the University of California-Berkley now inexplicably permits to teach law:

"What’s the big whoop?" asked Yoo. "The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election. President Obama ... can and should put people into office who share his views" and then the electorate "can decide whether they agree with him or not."

I repeat: This clown is actually teaching young people the law, or at least his most peculiar version of it, which sounds remarkably like Dick Nixon's, so famously encapsulated in the 2008 film, "Frost/Nixon": "If the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

Literal translation: The U.S. Constitution contains but the idiosyncratic vagaries of individual administrations; the document is valid, as presidentially interpreted, for four years or eight, and no longer.

This is real banana-republic stuff, which, oddly enough, when confirmed by the Yoo-Cheney School of Peculiar Law, means President Obama would in Constitutional fact have every executive right to install demonstrably treasonous anti-American, pro-Qaeda types in the Justice Department. Impeachment Articles be damned.

Yoo's runner-up in the "something truly bizarre" department? David M. McIntosh, former Congressman and Federalist Society co-founder, who Socratically enlightened us thus: "Was the [Justice Department] person acting merely as an attorney doing their best to represent a client’s case, or did they seek out the opportunity to represent them or write an amicus brief because they have a political or personal agenda that made them more interested in participating in those [terrorist] cases?"

And with that, as though there's any necessity to point this out, Mr. McIntosh gave us McCarthyism Unbound -- an Inquisitional, Paranoid and Partisan Style of governance in which every official is subject to endless investigations into past associations and curious affiliations with "front groups."

But I digress. The principle point to savor is that as ultraconservatism moves ever ultra, it leaves behind yet another bloc of vestigial conservative conscientiousness, as evidenced by the outraged peeling away of the "Brookings Institution 22," so instinctively opposed to the unpardonable scurrility of Ms. Cheney's "Al-Qaeda 7."