Monday, February 06, 2006

The Senate Hearings On Illegal Wiretapping



They are live-blogged in a few places, including on Corrente, where Leah says some important things about what the hearings mean and why we should be calling people once again.

The wingnut defenses of the wiretaps have three avenues. The first one is to argue that when the Congress gave Bush the green light to go to war it also gave him the right to ignore any laws he finds inconvenient. The second one is to find polls which show that people don't care about illegal wiretapping if it means that there will be no terrorist under their beds (even if polls don't really say this), and the third one argues that breaking the law has saved American lives and has been a good thing in general.

All these are extremely weak defenses, being totally incorrect, but as Leah points out:

The press decided early on the issue of warrantless electronic surveilance is a loser for Democrats, and having created the CW, aren't anxious to see it proved wrong.

And now we do the dance of the hearings where we pretend to look into the whole question. I hope that they talk about all the unrelated information the program has vacuumed into its files and how much this has cost us.