What is the pathology that allows self-proclaimed conservatives that continue to rally to George Bush to do so? Glenn Greenwald today examines an interview with Richard Posner, a hero to the group that Norman Mailer calls "flag conservatives" for his support of unchecked executive power and the view that terrorism is such a novel existential threat to the United States that we must fundamentally remake ourselves in order to fight it.

Posner's take on the nature of the Constitution is, and there's no way to put this any milder, diametrically opposed to the view taken by such arch-conservative jurists as Antonin Scalia. He calls the Constitution "flexible" and a "loose garment," arguing that we must reinterpret it to deal with problems the Founders couldn't have foreseen. The embrace of Posner's argument to support the radical conclusions of those like John Yoo -- the unitary executive theory -- is hardly the only bit of cognitive dissonance that flag conservatives have glossed over in the past few years, but it makes for a nice archetype. John Dean argues that these people are simply desperate at their cores to be ruled over, and so they support authoritarianism whenever they can, but I have a hard time seeing how that applies to them all. Sure, some of the more prominent flag conservatives may be opportunists, looking to project themselves to an audience (Rush Limbaugh comes to mind, as does noted glibertarian Glenn Reynolds), but think there's something else going on at a base level that neither of those two things explains.

For this bunch -- fiery partisans, the sort of people who stormed the vote-counting sessions in Florida's 2000 recount -- 2003 was the high-water mark of their political influence and maybe the first moment of its kind since FDR's partisan political capital peaked. Republicans -- conservative Republicans, aided by a relatively small cadre of neocons -- could've done anything they wanted then. They got the war they'd been asking Santa for for years, but little else. Now that public opinion has reined them in somewhat, they're making a last ditch effort to finally win the game at all costs, to close things out once and for all before the Democrats are able to take the field again, by instituting a quasi-Constitutional monarchy. Very few of them will benefit in any way from this, and none of them will feel "safer," but all of them will feel like they won, and that they finally showed those goddamn liberals what America is really all about -- them and the stars on their bellies.