Errant Cassandras

I’ve written virtually nothing about the “domestic wiretapping” story that broke last week, and for a pretty good reason.

There’s no real point in doing so.

The facts are still sorting themselves out. After the original New York Times story, most reasonable people realized that if all the President did was what the NYT alleged he did, then they had no problem at all with it. No laws broken. No harm done. A lot of good done.

I’m certainly not going to add factual value to the conversation with in-depth legal and logical analysis (such as has been provided by Orin Kerr, Jeff Goldstein, or former associate attorney general for the United States John Schmidt). That’s beyond my ken. I only have the observations I can provide – those of a layman, a libertarian, and someone who remembers that we are fighting a war.

Looking at this through all three filters I see two things: 1) the President did not exceed his authority, indeed that he stopped well short of what other Presidents have done in the past; and 2) we don’t know enough of the details of the program to really have a conclusive answer, nor should we ever know those details.

Lack of details, though, hasn’t stopped Eugene Robinson from running with his own version of the news anyway. In his column today, Robinson hasn’t gotten a single things right and seems to have gone out of his way to get everything wrong. With his usual superior tone and assumptions of facts that aren’t facts, he informs us that, “this administration’s usurpation of power” cann not be justified. Then he makes up a series of extreme examples to make the point “if he can do this thing, then why can’t he do all these extreme things”?

It’s a ridiculous argument that’s easily knocked down by the answer, “because what President Bush did was not illegal and those things you mentioned explicitly are”. I might add a “you exaggerating dope” behind it, but only if I was feeling particularly nasty, which I’m not.

I am, however, feeling confused. This story, like at least five others before and since in the past couple of years, resulted because some people who had access to classified information too it upon themselves to actually break the law and give it to reporters. The information they gave was national security-sensitive and directly bore on our ability to wage the war we’re fighting. Revealing that information as the various news outlets have put lives at risk. People could very well die because other people couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

That, though, is getting no real press coverage at all. Instead, we get ridiculous columns like Robinsons, and all manner of talking heads shrieking about the erosion of our civil liberties, even though not a single one of them can tell any of us exatcly which civil liberty (or liberties) we’ve lost.

Thanks to them – the folks who fail to realize that we actually are fighting a war, people are more likely to die. But that’s something they’re never going to realize either. For them, the war isn’t against Islamofascists. It’s against George W. Bush.

That confuses me greatly.

No related posts.

Category: Fighting the Islamists, Moonbat Nonsense, President George Bush