You're right. There is "nothing to see here."
I've been listening for a few years now to the howlers telling us America was doomed to become a dictatorship where Americans were going to have our rights destroyed at the whim of the Evil Lord Bush.
Oddly, the more information that came out over time, the more ridiculous that became.
As an example, you might have noticed that the Congress doesn't seem to have that much problem with the FISA issue any more. Not because they knuckled under to someone with near-zero political capital, but because they were informed in briefings over the past year that the facts were a bit different than what the loons had been pulling out of their ass.