AmSpec on my "national socialism" jibe

So, we're not allowed to call any American president fascist or Nazi, regardless of how closely their policies resemble fascism or Nazism?

It all depends on your definition of Fascism, of course, which is notoriously difficult to define precisely. I like Umberto Eco's definition myself:

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

I believe that many of these 14 characteristics can be applied, if not to Bush himself, then at least to the coalition that formed around him (the Limbaugh/Coulter/Free Republic wing of the Republican Party). Does that make me unserious?

Let whoever will write the articles, as long as I get to write the headlines.

I don't know about fascism, but this country did slip into a police state without anyone noticing. A police state is when the police (or military) create 'the laws', written or otherwise, and there is no recourse to the courts.

No, having 'terrorism' be an actual crime doesn't help if said detained people are not actually charged with it. They're not arrested for the crime of terrorism, they're arrested because the executive branch decided they were something called 'terrorists', which is unrelated to any actual laws about terrorism. (For example, shooting at soldiers of another country isn't terrorism under any law whatsoever, even if you do it outside the bounds of legal wartime behavior. It can be a war crime, or it can just be attempted murder, but it ain't terrorism.)

Law and judgment by the executive branch means 'police state'. That's what 'police state' means. A 'police state' is when a single branch of the government is doing all the functions of it...giving the law, enforcing the law(Which the police are supposed to do), and punishing people for violations. (I had to be redundant to get that across, as people seem to have trouble grasping it.)

As this is usually the executive branch, and usually using the police, it is called a 'police state'. Here, we used the military, but it is functionally the same.

No, calling them 'unlawful combatants' and asserting they're 'detained', not 'arrested', doesn't fix thing.(1) If you cannot leave, you are under arrest, no matter what anyone calls it. Arrest means 'cannot leave'. And the fact that the executive snookered people on how 'POW' law worked is not very important. (POWs are granted a special power to 'plea bargain' their way into POW camps. Neither they, nor any other prisoner captured in battle, have less rights. They can demand jury trials if they so choose.)

They still were arrested for violating imaginary executive branch laws and subject only to executive branch classification.

It just so happened this police state mostly effected people outside the US, so no one noticed. But they asserted the right, and used it a few times, to do this within the US too. So we were, according to the president, functionally a police state, even if he was aware that actually using that power would result in a backlash.