Turning Up the Volume Against Bush?

There has been a raft of really tough op-eds and editorials against the Bush Administration in the last couple of days. In the LA Times, Mort Halperin calls Bush worse than Nixon (because Bush doesn’t just violate the law, he openly defies it); Rosa Brooks ridicules the Hamdan response (“Creativity means never having to say you’re sorry.”); in the Boston Globe, John Dean laments the “Triumph of the Authoritarians,” while Bob Kuttner hopes that the courts and Congress are reining in the President’s “despotic designs”; all on top of the usual from Frank Rich (“as the world burns, Bush fiddles with P.R.”) and a lengthy editorial in the NY Times finding the “real agenda” not in the fight against terror but rather the aggrandizement of executive power.

Have I been missing something, or is this taking the criticism to another level? Is it possible that (on top of everything else) with the post-Hamdan contortions the president and his legal team may now be perceived as sore losers (surely among the greatest of political sins)? Or does it simply reflect increasing frustration among progressives – even when they get a clear win in the courts, they are still outmaneuvered by an Administration that just never admits error and doesn’t let anyone get in its way.