Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers this paragraph as part of his argument for why it is wrong to hate President Bush:

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach–especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats–but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

Note how shallow these substantive points are. First, Berkowitz writes that “the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal,” but fails to explain that it has endorsed the use of several techniques that are commonly viewed as torture. Then he congratulates the White House for complying with Supreme Court decisions, which I didn’t realize was an action worthy of praise. Things must be worse than I thought if this is the best defense a conservative law professor can muster.