President Bush likes to say history will judge his actions. Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic, no psychotic Bush basher, thinks it will judge him harshly (sub required):

The question history will ask is whether Bush's presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon's or only as bad as Jimmy Carter's ... If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, and conducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making proper legal provisions for those practices, Bush has run the war against jihadism out of his back pocket, as a permanent state of emergency. He engages in legal ad-hockery and trickery, treats Congress as a nuisance rather than a partner, and circumvents outmoded laws and treaties when he should be creating new ones. Of all Bush's failings, his refusal to build durable underpinnings for what promises to be a long struggle is the most surprising, the most gratuitous, and potentially the most damaging, both to the sustainability of the antiterrorism effort and to the constitutional order.

I think this is generally correct. While many of the individual actions the administration has taken in an aggressive fight against terrorism are defensible or outright correct, what's almost impossible to defend is why the administration has run what is likely to be a generation(s?)-long conflict like a temporary emergency. With a Republican Congress that would grant the president wide latitude to fight the war, the decision to treat the executive like a monarchy has been particularly unnecessary.

(HT: Sullivan)