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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (7903)	12/22/2005 11:14:58 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 542821

For me, the interesting thing about Hoaglund's column was the fact he was the one who wrote it. He's been quite supportive of the Bush folk. It looks to me as if it's a confluence of arrogance and incompetence at work here. But there is serious trouble. The argument I find most interesting in all this is the one which says the use of this stuff in the aftermath of 9-11 was widely accepted in the country as meeting any definition of necessity, along with "wartime" powers. But somewhere along the way, we stepped away from that. The Bush folk needed to make one of two cases to the country, more effectively. The first is that we should think of ourselves as in "wartime" in the same sense as immediately after 9-11. The counter to that, of course, is the degree to which European countries have lived with variants of local and international terror without declaring "wartime." The second would have been to move, even aggressively, to normalizing various procedures such as the NSA stuff, etc. That would have required, however, working carefully with the congress. Which they apparently are unwilling.