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Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Democrat Reaction To Warrantless Wiretapping

In the first, they said they seek only the law, and not the ephemeral politics of the day. George Bush broke the law, he ought to be punished, and that’s all there is to it. The White House’s top-secret executive orders which, in some specific instances, permitted surveillance of the international telephone calls of terrorist suspects, may have been in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. According to this line, which pervaded hours zero through thirty-six after the New York Times’ ostensibly revelatory piece, the outrage from the media and Bush’s political opponents has nothing to do with partisan politics. Liberal Democrats are concerned merely with black letter law. We don’t need to see their identification. Move along.

And then they learned that the words “ain’t no thang” would be an accurate way to encapsulate the past three decades of executive consensus on such warrantless spying. John Hinderaker plumbs those depths this morning.

So the opposition line has changed. It’s broader now, and replete with vagaries. It involves copious use of the word ‘king’. It’s all a bit over the top. Kos is quoting the Federalist Papers. Lofty stuff: just high enough that he and his compatriots will not have to explain how the NSA surveillance operations were illegal, unique to the Bush administration, functionally harmful to actual innocent citizens, or operationally ineffective in the prevention of terrorism. Outrage is enough.

UPDATE: Lots of e-mail on this one. I remember back in Junior High reading in Wired magazine of the Clinton administration’s Project Echelon, which was a devastatingly deep domestic spying program that included web traffic, e-mail, phone calls, and more. I was outraged. I’d like to think I was more intelligently outraged than today’s Kos-types, who seem to be capable of nothing more than repeating the words “King Bush” as if they were a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robot punch—sure to destroy, but only after seven or eight thousand identically weak deliveries of the same two words. But I was surely outraged, as I instinctually am at the Bush’s administration’s warrantless taps now. The difference is that, in 1999, partly borne of my youth and partly of the false sense of security the nineties inspired, I figured—wrongly—that the United States had no enemies. The only reason for spying was to pluck crimes that the government would not have known about through constitutional means.

Today there are enemies of America, so any out-of-hand dismissal of these intelligence programs strikes me as irresponsible pre-9/11 thinking. That said, my post above was simply an observation on the foibles of the Democratic response—ones which reveal the “outrage” to be mainly political in nature.

Posted on December 21, 2005 06:59 AM. Permalink