In this interesting interview broadcast yesterday, Dan Schorr offered perhaps the shortest, most trenchant summary and critique of Bush governance that I've heard: "He uses phrases as though they were policies."

Like most of us, I try to be savvy about MSM spin, but this one got by me. So this is just a recommendation that readers check out the superb legal analysis Glenn Greenwald offered on a US District Court's much-criticized decision that the administration's warrantless wiretapping program is illegal and unconstitutional. His political analysis of Bush support is also compelling. We need the focused intensity of lawyerly analysis of GOP and MSM spin more than we know.

Perhaps even more often than the Iraq war's loud-but-dwindling advocates warn that withdrawal would allow the creation of a terror haven, they talk about the "message" it would send. But after the public opinion results of the Israel-Hezbollah and Iraq wars, how does this take still get a deferential hearing? We are more despised, extremism is rising, and we've lost diplomatic leverage. Terrorists attack us in Iraq despite our persistence. Alternative interpretations of the psychology and "messages" sent by our foreign policy decisions are at least as plausible and should be elaborated by progressives in public debate.

Just after a major terrorist plot is uncovered, top conservative leaders express concern about the government response. One raises the specter of "ineffective authoritarianism" in devising measures to combat the threat. (They oppose a national ID card, citing privacy and civil rights concerns, and the lengthening of the time during which suspected terrorists can be held without charge.) No, this is not a figment of liberals' imagination. But alas, it is not happening in the U.S.

This scene, from a British Conservative Party press conference just broadcast on C-SPAN, reveals just how much the Republican Party's effort to centralize power on national security grounds depends on a dumbed-down politicization of security issues and just how little it appears to be rooted in core conservative principles.

(There was also, after an unambiguous defense of Israel's right to defend itself, a claim that its use of force in some aspects of the military campaign against Hezbollah was inappropriate.)

In some ways, of course, Britain is no civil libertarian paradise, and the Conservative Party holds plenty of views anathema to American liberals. But whatever complicated lessons may be drawn from this contrast of the British Conservatives and the American right, one surely is the need for liberals here not only to be more defiant and precise in protesting unreasonable assertions of executive power, but to work aggressively to move the national security debate out of the tabloid territory of arrogant policies justified by a crude ideological veneer and vague claims of necessity and into the realm of specifics.

The public has already begun to demand more competence in its government. This example shows that conservatives are perfectly capable of transcending the boilerplate hawkishness that has served Republicans well in the early post-9/11 elections -- but that we have to push the GOP in that direction. To expand the imagination and the aspirations of the people may be a great, and at least in present-day America, a distinctly liberal opportunity to begin to improve the nation's democratic dialogue and the government's accountability to the people.