I’ve always been more liberal than leftist — living in the Soviet Union and its successor states will tend to make you queasy about both ends of the political spectrum — but still fit more on the blue side of the aisle, and for a long time, took pride in this. In the Bush years especially it was left-leaning lawyers and antiwar activists who were able to look past gruesome current headlines about 9/11 or anthrax or bombings in Jakarta or London, and see the long-term damage being done to the national character through surrender on issues like torture, rendition, assassination, and watch-listing. The ACLU mattered in those years.

Now, tables have turned. Those who were once quickest to see through War on Terror propaganda are now most susceptible to the same appeals. You may once have been the DOJ’s loudest critics, but they’ve got you now. Man, do they ever have you, worse even than the Pentagon had Republicans in the Bush years. And the real shame of it is, they’re using the same arguments they employed then, down to the smallest phrases, just tweaked a little to fit certain progressive pretensions — and over you meekly fell, like Michael Spinks after the first love-tap from Mike Tyson. …

The reason it’s important to raise a fuss about abuses involving Trump isn’t in spite of the target. It’s because the DOJ trains extralegal weaponry (and its new expertise in lying through the media) on him in particular that these cases matter more. By the time Trump was elected, the only thing standing between the security bureaucracy and basically unlimited authority was the theoretical objection of voters and judges. So it mattered, a lot, when the DOJ repeatedly used illegal tactics on a sitting president and got away with doing so every time. If they could do it to Trump, they could (and do) do it to anyone, and seemingly on every day of his presidency, they violated new norms.