Jonathan Alter, Madman

Hugh Hewitt provides the definitive diagnosis via Radioblogger:

HH: Well, then we may have very well clinked glasses at some point and stared at each other menacingly across...I'm joking. Yesterday, you wrote, "we're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator. Do you think George Bush is acting like a dictator?

JA: Well, I think that in his own mind, if you had read the rest of that sentence, I think he's acting like Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, although unlike President Bush, Lincoln actually went and got Congressional authorization for some of the extra-Constitutional things that he did during that war. But I think in his own mind, he's not a dictator. But I think what he did in this particular...and I think to call him flat-out a dictator would be kind of a ridiculous exaggeration. But I think what he did in this case was dictatorial, extra-Constitutional, and I think many conservatives, Senator John Sununu being only one of many, many conservatives agree with me. And they see this as not really just the old kind of partisan mud-slinging, but a real question of separation of powers, and how far presidential power extends.

HH: So do you think he is acting as a dictator acts?

JA: I think he's acting dictatorially, yes. Because what a dictator does, and you know, it's funny. I'm just finishing writing a book that's going to be published next May about Franklin Roosevelt. And it's about Roosevelt in his first hundred days. And as he was coming into the presidency, editorials all around the country called for him to be a dictator. And he actually...I have a little scooplet, where he had a draft of a speech to the American Legion, where he basically created a private army, said under my powers as commander-in-chief, you are at my service, you being veterans, for the duration of the crisis, which at that point, was a banking crisis. You know, the country was flat on its back. And he had no Constitutional authority to do that at all. He decided not to give that speech, and not to move in an extra-Constitutional direction, although four years later, a number of people thought he did when he tried to pack the Supreme Court. In Bush's case, the reason that this is dictatorial, Hugh, is that when he says that his authority for doing this comes from two places, in his press conference...one, the Constitution, and two, the authorization, the Congressional authorization after September 11th, the Congressional resolution that said he was allowed to use all necessary force, quote unquote. But that was for military intervention. That was not a blank check to do absolutely anything that he wanted in the War On Terror.

This is not some fringe nutjob we're talking about here---this is a guy who as senior political reporter for Newsweek has major LWM clout.

Perhaps this puts the hysterical nature of media bias since the 2000 election in a bit more perspective.

These people actually believe Republican presidents to be tyrants.