Listening In

What are we to make of the seemingly major dust up around President Bush’s seemingly bald-faced admission (bragging?) that he damn well had the authority and the balls to use it when he authorized wire tapping surveillance without getting court authorization?

I think those are right who say he and the Republican Party are not likely to be punished by the electorate for being too zealous – even acting illegally – when guarding the lives of Americans against terrorists.

And that is what, to me, makes this business cynical. We will likely never know whether there may have been a moment so urgent that the president acted without authorization. For reasons I give below, I doubt it. But the jaw-set statement he gave about the matter at his press conference smacks to me of yet another opportunity to show his and his party’s toughness, so tough they’ll go outside the law, like the cowboys of old who kept outlaws at bay on the frontier by taking the law into their own hands.

It seems pretty clear that the legal requirements for tapping phones is not only pretty easy to come by, but can be done swiftly. Even retroactively. If something comes up on the spot, surveillance can be started and needs only be authorized within three subsequent days.

Some say the new ways of doing this listening-in may no longer be appropriate to getting legal permission for tapping individual phones. There may be intelligence that is so vague it would require putting computers to work randomly checking millions of phones. Distasteful as this sort of fishing expedition is, the court set up for hearing these matters would certainly bend over backwards to be understanding of the need for unusual wire tapping.

My bet is that the president and his minions were arrogant enough to believe they needn’t bother with the niceties of the law, nor should they because they were conducting this war, not the courts. And, perhaps saddest of all, even though John Dean is likely correct in saying Bush is our first president to incriminate himself in an offense against his oath to defend the Constitution, Bush – and Karl Rove – are likely correct that we American people will ignore our most precious freedom when we are sufficiently frightened.

So much for give me liberty or give me death.

We get the government we ask for.