[edited for clarity]
Gee, Joe Klein has a column that makes a good point.
Betsy's Page
IT's been a while since that happened.
He reviews Nancy Pelosi's release of a letter that supposedly expressed her qualms about the NSA surveillance program. However, her letter had nothing to do with that program - it was just an attempt to show that she had concerns and voiced them at the time even thought it was about something else. And her response showed exactly how she was trying to conflate two programs to achieve some sort of political reaction.
<<< House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, engaged in a small but cheesy bit of deception last week....
....The release of Pelosi's letter last week and the subsequent Times story ("Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show") left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn't exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."
A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are "fruit," and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders. >>>
"It's all fruit." In other words, if I can mislead people and use the media to score a point it will be worth it. Who cares about the danger the country is in from terrorists. It's all about the politics. And Klein is trying to tell Democrats that they're preparing for another defeat if they think that the American people don't want the administration to be as active as possible in protecting us. Sure, he takes the obligatory swipe at the administration, but Klein recognizes that nothing good has come from the New York Times story.
<<< It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.
There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another....
....The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known....
....National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country. >>>
Since the GOP is so likely to mess things up and give people few reasons to support them, it's a blessing to them to be opposed by such short-sighted Democrats who will not present much of an alternative.
betsyspage.blogspot.com
time.com |
