I think Greg Sargent gets at the point of this: The political press will latch onto basically anything that bubbles out of the conservative press, reporting it as a 50/50 controversy, even if it isn’t one.

So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation to prosecute the leaders in the U.S. government responsible for the “torture, cruel and inhuman treatment” of detainees during its own “war on terror.”

“Investigations and prosecutions should focus on the engineers of official policies that were the basis of illegal abuses, to send a clear signal that the absolute prohibition of torture and the ban on cruel and inhuman treatment will be respected by the United States,” the report said, adding that if the U.S. government fails to initiate prosecutions, then other countries will take up the cause. Italy, for example, recently convicted 23 Americans for their involvement in “extraordinary renditions.”

“Failing to hold accountable the architects and overseers of a policy of abuse undermines the U.S. justice system and the fundamental idea that law provides a check on power,” Alex Boraine, acting president of ICTJ, said in a statement today. “As we have seen in countless examples around the world, abuse of power by allowing torture and cruel treatment can tear down what the law and democracy have built.”

While there’s support among many Democrats for some sort of accountability, whether through criminal prosecutions or an independent truth commission, Republicans vehemently resist any suggestion that the Bush administration even did anything wrong.

Since Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Friday that the Justice Department would try the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators in a U.S. federal court in New York, some Republicans have denounced the move as an illegitimate attempt to put the Bush administration, rather than the terrorists, on trial.

“The government is going to try to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial. Defense lawyers will try and put the government on trial,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Fox News.

Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, added that any effort to use the 9/11 trial to “delve into a fishing expedition” to go after Bush officials is “wrong and unconscionable.”

Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal today, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo — a potential target of any future criminal prosecution of Bush officials — attacked the decision to try the 9/11 detainees in federal court as a dangerous mistake. “The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism,” Yoo wrote. “It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.”

Here’s a revealing moment on Fox News yesterday, after former President Bill Clinton met with Senate Democrats on health care and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) talked it over with Neil Cavuto. The host asked the senator about Clinton’s pitch, and how he reminded Democrats of the negative effects of reform’s failure in 1994.

DEMINT: I think it’s about 50-50 chance here in the Senate. They are going to try to rush something through. Those folks who met with Bill Clinton need to remember what happened when he tried to pass Hillarycare. That was when 1994 ushered in a long Republican majority. And I’m afraid that…

CAVUTO: By the way, he said apparently that happened because they didn’t do anything.

DEMINT: Well, I hope they don’t do anything again.

It’s important to point out that DeMint has proposed his own health care legislation–he did so months ago, and his position is that he wants Congress to tackle health care, just not this way. But DeMint is also the Republican who framed health care as Obama’s “Waterloo,” and has made the obvious point that a Democratic failure to pass what the president wants would devastate the party and its base.

My favorite response to that comes from VetVoice’s Richard Allen Smith:

A dumb f—— idea, not the least of reasons being that Major Hasan’s records indicated he had no religious preference”, so he wouldn’t have been screened anyway.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

Update: Via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter, conservative writer David Frum provides an elegant and moving illustration of this point.

What’s striking about this is that the numbers have only marginally gotten worse for President Obama in the three months since Fox News last asked this question. In July, it was 16 percent who blamed Obama and 61 percent who blamed Bush. That is, needless to say, not what Fox News viewers hear when they tune into the network. But it’s essential to understanding why the president remains popular and why Republicans are failing to really capitalize on economic gloom.

I tried to cross-reference this with the way Fox News asked the question during the Bush administration’s seven years of muddling through in Afghanistan. Surprisingly, it never got asked.

“The way the White House is attacking Roger Ailes and Fox,” said Republican strategist Craig Shirley, who is doing media for Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman’s upstart campaign in NY-23, “maybe he is already the president of a country!”

Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) gave some serious thought to the Ailes question “That’d be tough for him [to win],” said Olson, “just because being at Fox News, there are things they’d come after him about.” Olson looked to the example of Hannah Giles, the young college student who dressed up as a prostitute in the ACORN video sting, and whose grandmother lives in Olson’s district. “There have been all kinds of attacks on her,” he said, referring to legal threats from ACORN.

The White House criticism of Fox has coincided with–and probably contributed to–a healthy surge in the network’s ratings.

What happens next, I think, will depend on the mainstream media. After the one-two-three punch of Van Jones quitting the White House, ACORN being caught in James O’Keefe’s video sting, and Yosi Sergeant leaving the National Endowment of the Arts, we saw wave of media apologies from ombudsmen and reporters who worried that they’d paid too little attention to the right’s complaints. Since then, however, the Glenn Beck-led campaigns against the administration have taken a McCarthyite tone, attacking administration officials for being three degrees of separation from NAMBLA or for quoting Mao Zedong. The Dunn story is so ridiculous — quoting Mao is evidence of Communist sympathies? — that it’s making Beck look nuttier and less worth cribbing from.

The upshot for the White House is that its criticism of Fox News is painful but it’s working. During the campaign, Obama’s team boxed out Fox for its guilt-by-association stories, always packaged as news that the liberal media, being “in the tank” for Obama, was too cowardly to report. Robert Gibbs memorably asked whether Sean Hannity was an anti-Semite because he invited the notorious anti-Obama smear artist Andy Martin on his show. During the election this made sense, because local media coverage in swing states was obviously more important than a national cable channel that’s mostly influential in the beltway. Now, Fox’s coverage is so obscure and so disconnected from the White House’s political problems–it’s 9.8 percent unemployment, not Anita Dunn quoting Mao — that it seems worth ignoring again.

This post has been updated for clarity.

What does “on top” mean? I can’t figure it out. Do 65 percent of independents think that President Obama will resign and hand his office to Chris Wallace?