It’s nice to see a grown-up use the appropriate language to describe what’s going on:

Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what
should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration
and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian
project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have
heretofore constrained the executive branch.

Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented
executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely
without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like
it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court
authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by
Congress, that the laws don’t really mean what they say.

But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the
attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to
criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts about its
actions. And that attempt has relied, from the beginning, on
ascribing treasonous motives to those who refuse to toe the line….

Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian
project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of
our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a
long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar
double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if
forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush
hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right.
(That Ann Coulter, she’s such a kidder.)…

The latest installment in the "authoritarian project" has just arrived:

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely
  and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the
  Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon’s tribunal system, 
established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court….

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy
  combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

The draft document is here and the relevant paragraph appears to be Section 104, paragraph (e).

Justice Scalia, it will be recalled, correctly rebuffed the last version of this bit of crypto-fascism last year, much more pointedly than some of his "liberal" colleagues.

As Professor Nadelhoffer pointed out, we came dangerously close to the wrong decision in the most recent iteration of this conflict between the executive and the rule of law.

Of course, it would be impolite to use the word "authoritarian" or "fascist" to describe these machinations.  And politeness and civility is, of course, always the paramount virtue.  Amen.