Feingold's one-liners score points, make him a target for Bush loyalists

What do you suppose it is about Russ Feingold that has Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran so riled up?

McIlheran, the local conservative columnist the paper discovered working on its design desk awhile back, savages Feingold on today's op ed page.

It could just be that Feingold has become the leading critic of President George W. Bush on civil liberties issues, including the Patriot Act and the recent disclosure of domestic spying by the Bush administration.

But it must be something more than that to make McIlheran froth at the mouth when he mentions Feingold. He calls Feingold, a Rhodes Scholar, "sophomoric," but you know what Pee Wee Herman would say about that -- "I know you are, but what am I?" [I have never known Feingold to use the Pee Wee defense, but I thought I would do it for him.]

A careful read suggests that what really makes McIlheran's water hot is that Feingold has not only challenged Bush's authority, but has done it with some sound bites that make his points easy to understand.

Feingold has had a couple of good one-liners in the last several days.

The Journal Star of Lincoln, Neb., not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, led its editorial with:

The best line in the controversy over the Bush Administration’s spying on U.S. citizens came from Russ Feingold, D-Wis.: “He’s President George Bush, not King George Bush,” Feingold said. Exactly.

The editorial is entitled, "The founders did not want kingly powers." You can just feel McIlheran's blood pressure shoot up. That's what they're saying in Lincoln, Nebraska??

The Hill, which covers Congress,reported on another widely-quoted exchange:

None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who has led a bipartisan filibuster against a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, quoted Patrick Henry, an icon of the American Revolution, in response: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

He called Cornyn’s comments “a retreat from who we are and who we should be.”

Aside from the sound bites, Feingold has raised some serious legal and constitutional issues about how the Bush administration has conducted itself in the war on terror.

McIlheran dismisses those concerns as grandstanding, and assures readers there's nothing to worry about just because the government is tapping into private telephone calls, in the U.S., by American citizens, without court authority. Hey, he says, if you want Bush to follow the law, change the law. That, of course, is exactly the kind of imperious attitude that leads to comments about "King George."

McIlheran and other conservatives want to tear Feingold down now because he has become a threat to the Bush administration's high-handed disregard for the law -- and to its pursuit of the dead-ended war in Iraq. And what better place to start the attack than in the biggest newspaper in his home state?

They resent his one-liners and easily understandable sound bites because they present such a sharp contrast to George W. Bush.

Bush's most famous one-liners are things like, "Wanna buy some wood?" or "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job," or: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

If it's Feingold vs. Bush in a battle of wits, Bush enters the contest unarmed.

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Jay Bullock at Folkbum has a more detailed analysis of McIlheran's column.