Conservatives sharply split over spying, but you won't hear about it on talk radio

All is not well in Republicanville this holiday season.

The Wall Street Journal reports deep divisions among conservatives over the Bush administration's domestic surveillance and unauthorized wiretapping of telephone conversations.

For example:

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, described the spy program as a case of "presidential overreaching" that he said most Americans would reject. Columnist George Will wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that "conservatives' wholesome wariness of presidential power has been a casualty of conservative presidents winning seven of the past 10 elections."

Bob Barr, a Georgia conservative who was one of the Republican Party's loudest opponents of government snooping until he left Congress in 2003, says the furor should stand as a test of Republicans' willingness to call their president to task. "This is just such an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws," Mr. Barr says.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has called the program "inappropriate" and promised to hold hearings early next year. Republicans joining him include centrist Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Sununu of New Hampshire, along with limited-government types like Larry Craig of Idaho.

You wouldn't know, if you listen to Republican talk radio in Milwaukee, that there is any debate about this issue among conservatives. The Wall Street Journal's article explains why:

Some conservative critics contend that the fault lines within the party are easy to trace. As with so much else, they say, the trail leads to Iraq.

"From the beginning, the folks who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq have found good reason to think that all other Bush policies, from torture to domestic surveillance, are justified," said Robert Levy, a conservative legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "This is just one in a litany of ongoing events that have separated the noninterventionist wing of the Republican Party from the neocon wing."

And the neocon wing, of course, has the microphones and radio programs.

On the Iraq war, you'll find some strong dissent from Republicans on Bush policies, too. Check this Reconsidering Iraq site for starters, which says:

Prominent among the myths regarding the war in Iraq is the proposition that the pro-war interventionist position is universally supported by pro-American conservatives, and that opposition to the war is a left-wing position.

Overlooked is that some of the most principled opposition to current Iraq war policy comes from traditional, patriotic, pro-national defense, small-government conservatives, who object to current interventionist policy as over-reaching, counterproductive to our relationships with our allies, a factor aggravating creation of more terrorists, and resulting in an on-going heavy price in American lives and collateral damage.