Catching a few minutes of President Bush’s press conference this morning — and just a very few minutes — I again had to ask him through the television “Why didn’t you day this before?  Why haven’t you defended yourself before now?”  And I thought mostly of the attacks against him for supposedly ignoring the constitution and committing war crimes, and Victor Davis Hanson’s recent point came to mind (emphasis mine):

Bush’s Texas-twang explication that he kept us safe for seven years was laughed at, especially by a suave ex-Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama on the stump. And then what?

Are we now in February to see no more Patriot Act? At least FISA overturned? Couldn’t we shut down the Gulag Guantanamo by January 25? (as easy as getting out entirely from Iraq by “March 2008” as promised once by Obama?)

Or now are all these once so clear-cut issues “problematic” and “raise concerns”? The irony? Compared to what Lincoln, Wilson, FDR or Truman did during wartime, George Bush was a constitutional purist—and the former all had conventional enemies in wartime, not stealthily [sic] terrorists who entered our shores to murder 3,000 Americans.

There are two points to be made here.

First, if W is genuinely malicious and evil for his supposed disregard of the constitution, and it is a key factor in many liberals denouncing him as our “worst ever” president, shouldn’t we start tearing down Roosevelt, Lincoln and Truman?

Second, liberals never seemed to grasp, and still haven’t, that this is an unconventional war rather than a simple matter of criminal prosecution.  They refuse to acknowledge that this is something we’ve never quite faced before.  Which is why Obama could make his stupid statement that “tiny” countries like Iran and Venezuela don’t pose a threat, as if he had never heard of asymmetric warfare.

Does the current conflict justify any and all measures?  No.  But anyone who thinks that liberals’ complaints have been based on love of certain constitutional provisions rather than taking up whatever weapon is handiest in their quest to demonize George Bush is, I think, fooling themselves.  (I give more benefit of the doubt to libertarian criticisms, though.)