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For instance, I wonder why the FISA judicial warrant proviso was so onerous that the FBI could not make after-the-fact requests as are provided for in the law. Surely, three days is enough to get authorization after a wiretap is applied to someone communicating with an Al-Qaeda suspect overseas. Or is it a bureaucratic headache?
Also, Bush is a bit disingenuous when he avers that revealing the enlarged mandate is similar to publishing the fact that Osama bin Laden’s cellphone network was compromised. I’m sure that the subversive types sending and receiving messages overseas from bad guys overseas are aware that they may be overheard. And that won’t stop a culture that produces suicide bombers from taking that risk.
That said, there’s a lot of off-the-wall sawdust coming out in the press that reveals the wackiness of the far-left MSM press. In particular, NEWSWEEK magazine somewhat unhinged commentator Jonathan Alterman asserts that
No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.
Alterman employs the word “desperation” for a third time later in his hastily written and poorly-thought through screed.
What Alterman calls desperation might actually be a desire by the President to justify a secret program which he believed was helping keep terrorists from another attack on U.S soil. Or anger that classified leaks expose sensitive intelligence sources and methods.
Psychologists call what Alter and other far-left commentators do when they employ emotional language like desperate [bad] or passionate [good to lefties] as “projection.”
Projection applies when one’s own psychological make-up and emotions are presumed to be present in another person with whom one is dealing, or in this case, writing about.
On the few times I have seen Alterman on TV, he appears very emotionally involved in his presentation, not to the point of hysteria like some histrionic female senators and House Minority Leader from California, but on the edge of losing his equilibrium.
As he does further on in this column when he calls for articles of impeachment, comparing Bush’s actions with those of Nixon.
It should be apparent to every balanced observer that Nixon misused his authority for domestic political gain, not as Bush has allegedly done to protect the US from dangerous foreign terrorists.
Alterman’s feverish commentary is obviously hot off the presses, and written for a deadline, and I would hope that he would realize that impeachment for extending national security safeguards could rebound right back at his own Democratic constituency, which has a very low level of confidence concerning national security affairs.
But the hyperbolic inside-the-Beltway-Boston-corridor obsessiveness with process does not play well in the saner parts of the country. The success of the Iraqi elections is reality; classified leaks by "patriots" are kerfufflery.
Investigations by Congress may be warranted, but this is another tempest in a teapot that tends to make all parties involved look a little foolish.
UPDATE
Just watched Alter and over-the-hill mugwump David Gergen on Hardball. Alter was less strident than his article, which the obsequious obsolescent Gergen praised, avoiding the silly comparison with Nixon, though truffle-snuffer Gergen had to mention his own undistinguished service in the Nixon Administration---as the white house liberal/gerbil to test for allergic reactions!
Michelle Malkin and especially RealClear Politics put the sophomoric ueberliberal Alter in his left-of-the-road niche.
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