Since you're not allowing comments on the previous post about domestic spying, I'll post here, and quote Bob Barr, a man with impeccable conservative credentials, speaking on CNN:

"…Well, the fact of the matter is that the Constitution is the Constitution, and I took an oath to abide by it. My good friend, my former colleague, Dana Rohrabacher, did and the president did. And I don’t really care very much whether or not it can be justified based on some hypothetical. The fact of the matter is that, if you have any government official who deliberately orders that federal law be violated despite the best of motives, that certainly ought to be of concern to us…

"…Well, gee, I guess then the president should be able to ignore whatever provision in the Constitution as long as there’s something after the fact that justifies it…

"…The fact of the matter is the law prohibits — specifically prohibits — what apparently was done in this case, and for a member of Congress to say, oh, that doesn’t matter, I’m proud that the president violated the law is absolutely astounding, Wolf…"

Sorry, John, you don't have a leg to stand on here. The President broke the law. If the law was "stupid," then it should have been changed--we are still, I believe, a nation of laws and not of men. And as any Quaker will tell you, if one decides that one's conscience demands that one break a law, one has absolutely no right to expect to avoid the consequences.

I will agree that the timing of the story is abominable in many respects, but my gut feeling is that Bush deserved it, even if the Iraqi people didn't. It's well past time he learned what his oath to uphold the Constitution means.

I haven't been following the case much at all, mostly because I can't make heads or tails of all the intricacies of it.

I will say this much, based on the President's remarks: With so many people involved in all these doings-- Congressmen, Justice Department personnel, judges, presumably a few military personnel as well-- one would think if all these doings were against the law, someone would have spoken up long before now.

Also, federal law is such a tangle, it's entirely possible for someone, from the President right down to you and me, to do some common-sense thing in good faith, believing it to be lawful, when in fact some Congress sometime, against all common sense, made it unlawful.

Also, a fair-minded observer would take a wait-and-see attitude toward the whole thing, bearing in mind a little something called "the presumption of innocence". It's funny how the President is already convicted by the oh-so-objective mainstream media.

Another thing, Dave, while I think of it, speaking as a liberal in the Nineteenth-Century sense of the word--

Be a little careful who you put the label of "conservative" on. Bob Barr isn't so much a "conservative" as he is an authoritarian. Far from "conserving" traditional American rights and liberties, authoritarians generally want to dispense with many of those rights and liberties. In that sense, Barr may have more in common than he would care to admit with too many on the "left" (or who are "liberal") who feel the same way-- that people need to be controlled, and that they (the authoritarians, whether of the "right" or of the "left") are just the people to do the controlling.

Bleah.

No, Hale, this is not good-faith behavior. There are well-established procedures for domestic wiretaps, and Bush unilaterally decided he didn't need to follow them. Ezra Klein puts it very well:

"Everything Bush is doing is legal, but nothing in the way he's doing it is. When you need a wiretap, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows you to apply for one. When you need it yesterday, FISA allows you to place the tap immediately and retroactively clear it with a judge 72 hours later. The law strikes a balance between broad executive powers and substantive oversight -- the president has full authority to assault the evildoers, but cannot deploy the law on behalf of his own political interests. It's a check on totalitarianism. What Bush has done is unilaterally decide the oversight unnecessary. Given the shape and safeguards of FISA, there was no operational need to evade it. It was an exclusively ideological decision in service of unlimited executive powers, and it's chilling."

And, of course, it doesn't matter what Barr's ideology is, although I've always heard him identified as a conservative, and his voting record was certainly conservative. What he said what very, very right. (And no, I won't apologize for the pun...)

(The comments were off by mistake, but the subject fits here as well).

Barr is ful of baloney.
to quote another impeccable conservative, Mark R Levin:

"...The Foreign Intelligence Security Act permits the government to monitor foreign communications, even if they are with U.S. citizens -- 50 USC 1801, et seq. A FISA warrant is only needed if the subject communications are wholly contained in the United States and involve a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.

The reason the President probably had to sign an executive order is that the Justice Department office that processes FISA requests, the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), can take over 6 months to get a standard FISA request approved. It can become extremely bureaucratic, depending on who is handling the request. His executive order is not contrary to FISA if he believed, as he clearly did, that he needed to act quickly. The president has constitutional powers, too..."

"Everything Bush is doing is legal, but nothing in the way he's doing it is".

This is exactly backwards. I don't think Bush is violating the law, but even if he IS, he is violating the letter of the law but adhering to the spirit of it.

The spirit of the law in this area is to allow the Executive branch to gather intelligence with the minimal necessary damage to privacy. That's exactly what this program does. It is strictly limited in time and scope, it has oversight both by Congress, the Justice Dept, and the President personally, it has to be renewed every 30 days, and there is good reason to believe it is effective, and not just a fishing expedition.

And what is revealed about the President's attackers is that they don't CARE about the spirit of the law, and they don't care about protecting our people from terrorists or supporting our country in time of war. This is just a dirty unpatriotic partisan attack tricked out in phony moral outrage.

UPDATE: this link says the Administration was violating FISA.

My concern remains the spirit in which this issue is being pursued. The fraudulent "moral outrage" by people who are themselves blandly content to use illegally-leaked classified information in partisan attacks is disgusting.

And is a gross violation of America's traditions of conduct during war time.

I don't know who this Glenn Greenwald person is, but just a skim through his front page shows he's basically an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq-war (as in anti- anything good coming out of it) blogger so I wonder just how reliable his pronouncements are.

What I find really strange is the fact that he has my blog on his blogroll. I've never (to my knowledge or remembrance) encountered him before.

It's a bit of an odd list, considering his views. Sometimes people who are starting a blog just copy somebody else's blog roll code en mass, but one would think he would copy from someone who shares his views.