Divinest Sense

Things are pretty bad now, right? We’ve got a conservative administration out of control, a polarized electorate that finds its cherished good ol’ American myopia ain’t no good without a good set of lenses lying around… and, in our mass media, we find those dirty, misplaced and broken lenses.

If you think we’re floating in a sickening factless limbo now, just imagine where we’d be without bloggers. Say what you will about the ranting, craziness, and lack of journalistic standards on the wild frontier of the internet, but bloggers are the people staying up late at night doing the tireless research that our brightest and best newspaper and TV journalists are supposed to be doing.

So anyway, on with the item of the day: the Washington Post picks up this story from blogger Glenn Greenwald:

The Bush administration rejected a 2002 Senate proposal that would have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain surveillance warrants in terrorism cases, concluding that the system was working well and that it would likely be unconstitutional to lower the legal standard.

Yep. Looks like the ol’ administration whine that it just taaaaaakes tooooooo loooooong to obtain probable cause for a FISA-approved warrant is completely without merit. The Justice Depot spokeslawyer tries to defend the administration by boring everyone to death about how “reasonable basis” and “reasonable suspicion” are not the same thing, but of course they’re used interchangeably by ambulance-chasers and supreme court justices alike. Don’t try to out hair-split us, Bush folks. It cannot be done. Just go back to the usual flag-waving ad hominem defense strategies that have served you so well in the past. That’s better.

The party “strategists”, of course, are the most fascinating bloodless deep-sea creatures to watch in any time of political crisis. Apparently some unnamed democrats (yeah right) say the NSA wiretaps are a strategic “loser” of an issue for the dems, because the trope of republicans being stronger on national security trumps all, no matter what. But why are they scrambling to sound legally credible?

Exhibiting an obsession to detail not seen in the Social Security rollout a year ago, the White House is even waging a war on the semantics being used in the debate, lashing out at reporters who call the program “domestic” spying, because the monitored calls involve a person overseas. It is also putting out pages of highly detailed — and often hotly disputed — legal analyses of the program and drawing what Democratic critics and many independent analysts regard as questionable historical parallels to show Bush is following a long wartime tradition.

Oh boy, they really are cute when they try to actually refute our claims point-by-minuscule-point. They don’t look particularly strong on anything when they’re whining about whether your phone calls are “domestic” or not. Hillary Clinton pours some ice-cold water over their heads:

Speaking to reporters, Clinton took aim at what she called a lawless assertion of power: “My question is, why can’t we do what we want to do within the rule of law?”

Ah, Hillary, Hillary - you should be waving a flag and a bible when you say that. Pure, lucid reason is just not enough.