That's consistent with everything we know about the Republican playbook since the days of Nixon. Since it's late for me, I'll just make a few not-so-random points:

1. I agree with the posters who say to take Republicans at their word. They really do think that we're traitors, just like they say they do, and so, in their minds, they're entirely justified in surveilling us. (Remember, please, that the surveillance program is not merely voice (phone) data, but digital data, like email, this blog, etc.) We separate ideas like "continuity of government" and "re-election campaign." They don't. It's the National Security equivalent of having no domestic policy arm.

2. Remember that we have very few Arabic translators. So what's the point of having a massive voice and data capture and data mining program if you can't do the translations? Now, if the data being captured and mined is in English, i.e., domestic, that little difficulty vanishes.

There's a very interesting article from last year in the New York Review of Books from Thomas Powers here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18730

It reads in relevant part:

"The questions hardest to answer will be what the NSA actually did, and whether it served any useful purpose. A recent New York Times story contradicts the President’s claim that the NSA program was “limited…to known al-Qaeda members or affiliates.” Citing anonymous FBI officials, the Times claimed that the NSA flooded the bureau with “thousands” of names per month to check out for possible terrorist connections. Far from being a “vital tool,” as described by President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing will-o’-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And far from saving “thousands of lives,” as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly."

To me, that "small, sharply focused program" sounds a lot like ratf*cking (with a sideline of surveilling journalists and their contacts to make sure that the right stories get planted, and the right people get owned.)

Not that I'm foily, but at this point we have a baseline for how these people operate.

I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, here, Glenn. You're acting like the First Amendment was enacted for some other reason than profit maximization for media barons. Stop with the crazy talk, please!

Seriously, how are newspapers going to maintain their 20% plus profit margins if they have to do actual reporting? Press releases are so much cheaper. And the government gets the word out, the people get to know what they need to know, and everybody goes home happy. I'd call it a win win situation!

It's exactly the same with the winger shills who infest the airwaves. Shouting heads are a lot cheaper than actual news gathering, and you can't fill up all the time with reruns and cooking shows, now can you?

Every day, Glenn, you bring the day when these guys are gutted and disintermediated and their operations destroyed and their corporate headquarters burned and the very grounds on which they stood plowed and salted -- I say, every day you bring those happy events closer, for which I would thank the God[ess][e][s] of My Choice, If Any.

The Clang Bird flies in ever-decreasing concentric circles until it disappears up its... Well, this is a family blog.

Which is exactly the sort of military-to-White House-to-military circle that Bergner is flying in, wouldn't you say?

And it seems that the same tactic that the White House Iraq Group used in the disinformation campaign to plant stories in the press before our current war are being used to gin up the case for the next one. Good to know.

Scooter was Judy Miller's handler in the WHIG. I wonder who Michael "Kneepads" Gordon's handler is?

Here.