JOE KLEIN CATCHES PELOSI

Tom Maguire quotes a Time Online piece by Time Commentator Joe Klein extensively in a piece well named "How to Stay Out of Power." Klein takes the Liberal Dems and in particular Nancy Pelosi to the woodshed for a good old-fashioned butt-whuppin’ over the NSA eavesdropping.

Klein exposes Pelosi’s apparent dishonesty in sending the NYT a 10/11/2001letter which made her appear to protest a program the NSA had not yet initiated. Indeed, the witless Pelosi expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with "specific presidential authorization."

In fact, a 2002 investigation by the Joint Intelligence Committees concluded that the NSA was not doing as much as it could have been doing under the law—and that the entire U.S. intelligence community operated in a hypercautious defensive crouch. The dishonest Pelosi signed off on that
Joint Inquiry which indeed faulted FISA courts for dilatory responses to FBI requests [Finding 12]

Joe Klein quotes:

"Hayden was taking reasonable steps," a former committee member told me. "Our biggest concern was what more he could be doing."

At the risk of redundancy, here is Joe again:

The release of Pelosi's letter last week and the subsequent Times story ("Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show") left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn't exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."

Joe is too kind or pro-Dem to point out Pelosi’s chronic opportunism verging on dishonesty. He does point out that what her objective aims at is the goal of misrepresenting a national security issue as a civil liberties threat---thus activating the ACLU anarchistic left that she and Howard Dean love to prod into action.

But Klein has a very serious point here:

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

He points out in praising the NSA leaks

the Democrats are on thin ice here. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.
The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.
In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year.
But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

The fact remains that back in 2001, the protean Pelosi was asking for "specific presidential authorization," in 2002 she signed as Co-Chair with Porter Goss on the
Joint Inquiry that the FISA courts were not acting fast enough [Finding 12] and in 2005, the artful dodger from SF brays that the President exceeded his constitutional prerogatives in trying to defend the country. Which Pelosi should we believe?

With Democratic Leadership harking back to Nixon Era paranoia, looks like the Republicans might just pull off another couple of national election victories.