It's much worse than that. Even on their own terms, the people making this claim are simply showing their ignorance.

Have these people heard of the Alien and Sedition Acts? That was pretty abusive to the First Amendment. And someone should tell Andrew Sullivan that his hero Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeaus Corpus, that he threatened to arrest Supreme Court justices who disagreed with him, who sent the army to the Maryland Statehouse to make sure the legislature voted the way he wanted them to. Woodrow Wilson had critics of his war policy arrested (as did Lincoln). And, of course, Japanese internment on the west coast.

The fact is, there probably has been no war time president more careful of protecting individual liberties than George Bush.

So basically your point is that if we look at the most shameful historical examples of abuses of the bill of rights, George Bush is NOT as bad as some of them.

"The most hostile in history to the Bill of Rights." ...

"So basically your point is that if we look at the most shameful historical examples of abuses of the bill of rights, George Bush is NOT as bad as some of them." ...

No, His point is that liberals are claiming Bush has been the worst in history. Eric is simply pointing out that that is demonstrably false.

Well, yes, bob, becasue the point of the post is that people who claim that Bush's actions have been the worst are either woefully ignorant, or lying. People like Sullivan are, via their overheated rhetoric, so consistently dishonest about historical events, that they are barely worth reading anymore. The irony is that they lie egregiously in their efforts to denounce Bush's dishonesty.

So basically your point is that ....

Well it was a struggle, but you got half the point, Bob. The other half is that those who say Bush is WORSE than all of his predecessors ARE WRONG. And since the population of unhinged critics who say this on the left is rather large, there is a lot of demagogery and falsehood among those critics.

Bob, think hard and ask yourself what kind of criticism of an administration is more effective, that that is grounded on fact regarding true flaws or shameless lies and overheated ideological rhetoric.

Eric,

While your argument is correct overall, Cramer's comparison of Gitmo and the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII is flawed.

It's true that about 20,000 to 30,000 Japanese non-resident aliens were interned as citizens of a hostile power. That means basically they were place in a minimum security lockup. The 100,000 or so Japanse Americans were not interned but relocated from the West Coast, which could not be defended against sabotage.

Most Americans of Japanese descent at the outset of WWII had dual citizenship, US and Japanese. In the 1920s, a baby born to Japanese immigrants in the US was automatically granted Japanese citizenship. In the 1930s, newborns had to be taken to the local Japanese consulate to get their dual Japanese citizenship, which almost all Japanese parents did to maintain an attachment to their mother country. At the outset of WWII, the US had a large population of citizens who had dual citizenship with Japan, a country that had launched a war against us.

Among the Japanese population on the West coast were many stridently pro-Japanese groups. For example, there was a Japanese Army Officers organization that organized supplies to be sent to Japanese soldiers waging war in China. The children of these Japanese went to Japanese language and culture schools which taught them to worship the Emperor and give him their loyalty, something like Islamic madrassas today. Some of the second generation, called Nisei, returned to Japan and became fanatic Japanese nationalists. This group particularly worried the government as potential spies and saboteurs.

The government solution was to relocate citizens with dual Japanese-American citizenship away from the vulnerable coast. That means that they could move to the interior of the US and live freely. If they had no place to go, they could go to internment camps.

Japanese-Americans in internment camps could come and go to local towns to shop. If they found a job in middle America, they could leave. Five thousand Japanese-Americans left the internment camps to go to college during the war.

By contrast, Gitmo is a prison. The prisoners there can not come and go as they please. They can not leave for jobs in America. They can not leave if they get accepted into an American college. Those are significant differences.

In short, Japanese-American relocation camps are not equivalent to Gitmo. The only similarity is that both featured excellent medical care.

The details of Japanese-American internment during WWII are spelled out in detail in Michelle Malkin's book, "In Defense of Internment."

I would think that Lincoln played more hob with the Bill of Rights than Bush ever did. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeus corpus, locked up people indefinitely without charge or trial, shut down newspapers, ignored the Supreme Court's overturning of his decisions, and generally ignored any individual liberty that obstructed the war effort.

Of course, that's not a comparison that critics of Bush care to make, is it?

Another thing that has been consistently lied about for the past couple years is the treatment of captured enemy in previous wars, and the degree to which illegal violence directed at the captured was a byproduct of deliberate, knowing, policy. Examine the policy adopted in regards to propaganda designed for consumption of soldiers and Marines in the Pacific Theater of WWII, along with statements made by officials, and no other conclusion can be made that the widespread instigation of illegal violence that captured Japanese soldiers experienced, including summary execution, was deliberately planned for, although not formally codified. The fact that their remained in place formal codes against mistreatment and that people were punished at times when mistreatment occurred, in rear areas, does not change this.

People like Sullivan, in their efforts to denounce Bush, have completely whitewashed the reality of the exraordinary brutality of WWII and other wars. Whatever one thinks of the torture which has occurred in this conflict, and I think it is inexcusable, lying about the past is a very bad thing to do, for many obvious reasons, not least of which is that it damages the credibility of those seeking to point out current wrongdoing. To listen to people like Sullivan, Rumsfeld's greatest error was not instigating a propaganda campaign to convince our troops in Iraq and elsewhere that Muslims were sub-human cockroaches undeserving of any protections normally extended to human being when waging war, while having a few prosecutions for mistreatment that occurred well to the rear of the conflict. Essentially, Sullivan doesn't like it that the Bush Administration was not more competent in concealing the efforts to have prisoners treated in an illegal fashion.

This thing called "Bush" that people talk about is a funhouse mirror reflecting their manias, paranoias, and credulity. The real guy is an empty frame--maybe the emptiest ever.

To regard him as either likeable or hateable, as either a champion or an enemy of freedom, you have to credit or blame him for things he hasn't done, or willfully misunderstand what little he actually has done--which is, in sum, so like as to be indistinguishable from what any President during any of our lifetimes has done.

He's the most average President possible. You can hate him for that, if you hate Presidents as such, but (too) few genuinely do. If you hate him for anything else, or love him for any reason at all, you're a sucker.

"By contrast, Gitmo is a prison. The prisoners there can not come and go as they please"

By contrast Gitmo houses unlawful combatants collected on foriegn battlefields and wanted terrorists given to us by foriegn governments, while internment camps housed people guilty of being the wrong race. Isnt that a slightly more relevant distinction?!

Moreover your characterization of the 'forced relocation' of Japanese-Americans is simply false:

"March 27 to 30, 1942: The Western Defense Command issues proclamations which severely restrict the movements of persons of Japanese descent in the Pacific Coast military area, and which prohibit them from leaving the military area. The Western Defense Command had decided that allowing people of Japanese descent to leave the military area and go wherever they chose was creating too much disturbance and opposition among local people.

April 7, 1942: A meeting of WRA officials with representatives of eleven western states convenes in Salt Lake City, Utah. The representatives for the most part express distrust of and dislike for the people of Japanese descent who were being evacuated to their states. The WRA concludes that, because of this hostile local opinion, the evacuees from the Pacific Coast must be housed in evacuation camps guarded by the Army. During the meeting, the governor of Wyoming told the director of the WRA, “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/japanese_internment/1942.htm

Good post Mark. I'd like to add one very important fact that defenders of internment ignore--that the internment was only for the west coast of the continental US. All of the arguements for internment there are doubly true for Hawaii. AND, unlike the west coast, Hawaii actually WAS attacked.

And yet Hawaii did not participate in the internment. And there were no examples of Japanese-American betrayal--in Hawaii or anywhere else in the US.

Hawaii's experience disproves the argument that the program of internment and relocation was necessary.

Re-making the balance in the Supreme Court, tax cuts, two invasions of hostile countries, sustaining the largest loss of life on US soil from a single act of violence, expanded the federal role in education, and he attempted to re-make social security and immigration law. Who knew "average" could be so exhausting?

There's a reason people have strong feelings about Bush. He has convictions and acts on them. Clinton was an average president. Bush I was an average president (Desert Storm was pushed on him by Thatcher). Anyone can gauge the mood of the country and govern accordingly. Bush II has chosen to herd cats instead. He's not terribly good at it, though, and his near term stature suffers for it.

"And yet Hawaii did not participate in the internment. And there were no examples of Japanese-American betrayal--in Hawaii or anywhere else in the US.

"Hawaii's experience disproves the argument that the program of internment and relocation was necessary."

While I agree that the program wasn't necessary, there was at least one example of a Japanese-American actively assisted a Japanese pilot after Pearl Harbor. It was described in Bill Hosokawa's book Nisei. There was some considerable reason for the government to be concerned about Japanese agents among the Japanese-American population--we now have access to documents that show that Japanese intelligence officials were telling their bosses in Japan that they had arranged such, and some were working in defense plants and on Army bases. I still don't think the relocation was justified by wartime conditions (or Hawaii would have been included in the internment), but it wasn't just racism that drove this.

The paranoid fantasies about the USA are, unfortunately, not new.

Tom Wolfe wrote about a 1965 Princeton panel: "He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." here

The late Revel repeated the statement more recently in his last writings.

And Robert Heinlein wrote in "Tramp Royale":

I said to a man in South Africa:
"You insist that anyone in the United States who expresses an opinion favorable to Russia or to communism is immediately thrown in jail. How do you reconcile that with the fact that the communist Daily Worker is still published in New York?"

He simply called me a liar.