With his continual claims of "executive privelege" and insistance on warrantless wiretapping, Bush has made his stand:

Privacy is only for the president!

I'm tired of hearing the wingnut claim that the program is only listening to foreign terrorists. Without oversight we KNOW that any such power WILL be abused. That's why we have FISA in the first place.

The National Association of Manufacturers has been following this story closely and have been putting up misleading posts on their blog on an almost daily basis. Their lates entry on the subject included the following sentence so I felt compelled to respond:

The activists want to undermine the legitimate surveillance of foreign communications through litigation[...]

http://blog.nam.org/archives/2008/02/fisa_money_as_m.php

You not only have no basis for that statement, but it borders on slanderous. All the "activists" that I am familiar with are motivated by the desire that the traditional rule of law extend to the executive branch and that any needed modifications to the FISA law are provided for by the normal political process that the Constitution requires.

The Bush administration's brazen desregard for not only the FISA law but also the Presidential Records Act and his declared intention to ignore any other portion of any statute which purports to regulate his own behavior or freedom to act, is more than adequate motivation for anyone who cares to see that the Constitutional balance of power is maintained.

The accusation that the EFF is motivated by either financial reward or the desire to inhibit intelligence collection is not only dishonest, but it undermines any legitimate arguments you would care to advance in defense of the current NSA program or the President's conduct.

By capitalizing a word like "Serious," Glenn shows us how the word "serious" is a transparent, shrill, craven Beltway Talking Point. Turn on cable news a bit, and one soon finds this use of "Serious."

And by capitalizing a word like "Terrorist," Glenn shows the word has become an empty signifier: i.e. there is no terrorist -- there's only a Terrorist, which is a rhetorical construction created for the bludgeoning of one's political opponents. And the sad thing is that there are terrorists out there, but the people wielding the word Terrorist have little interest in them. Note the post on the 24-style GOP FISA advertisement.

Glenn's moderate usage of the capitalization trope highlights transparent Talking Point Language (TPL), which does everyone a great service.

the media isn't here to inform us(the TradMed anyway) ... as Glenn has made clear(with chumps like John King), and we have seen with the likes of Tweety and Teh Big Punkinhead(that's Matthews and Russert for the uninitiated) they don't know squat(or don't care) about most of the issues. Most of the commenters here are more informed about the issues than any of the news people on TV. With Russert's performance the other night, someone mentioned a piece James Fallows wrote 12 years ago now about why Americans hate the media. It is just as true now as it was then. If you click on my handle, it will go to my blog, which has a link to the Fallows article.

Glenn Greenwald wrote:

government officials are free to break the law in secret by claiming that national security concerns prevent courts from ruling on what they did

Isn't that exactly what the state secrets doctrine is, and isn't it something which has been upheld by the Supreme Court -- which, when the original case in which it was upheld turned out to be a situation where the government lied to cover up wrongdoing, and didn't have any actual need for secrecy, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal?

Richard M. Nixon comes to mind.

Nixon was not under indictment.

Weinberger was indicted but had not yet gone to trial when he was pardoned.

The bit about Helping the Enemies is purely false, just standard Bush fear-mongering

I think for George Bush, 'enemies' includes Democrats and other Liberals...

They find Bush's argument very persuasive... They don't ignore it.

here:

http://digg.com/politics/George_Bush_told_the_truth_yesterday

Could the reluctance, silence or outright support (Rockefeller, etc.) on amnesty spring from the Dems in Congress having been briefed on the program way back when without raising their voices in opposition? If they raise a fuss about it now, doesn't it make them look like a bunch of partisan political hacks (the Republican line of attack) and not responsible government officials pledged to uphold the Constitution? Isn't the Dems complicity on this issue part of the problem?

I don't think this is a false statement at all. The Bush/Cheney administration has been very consistent in this. The American people and the constitution are the enemies of the Bush/Cheney administration, terrorists are a smoke screen.

However, the awful truth is that the media, simply put, are criminals in bed with the Bush administration, from 9/11 to Iraq to torture to economic mischief to spying.

The illegal spying began in February of 2001. At that time Bush was not concerned with terrorism;this to the distress of Richard Clark who ran around as if his 'hair was on fire' trying to warn of the attacks to come without being able to arouse the Bush administration from their inert state of torpor.

Terrorism was not the target of the illegal spying, or, if it was the target, the illegal spying was ineffective.

If terrorism was not the target of the illegal spying, then who or what was the target? If terrorism was the target of the illegal spying, it was not effective and contributed nothing to pre-911 security. Why, then, spy illegally?

I'm not aware of a preemptive pardon ever being exercised before in the history of the Republic, are you?

Richard M. Nixon comes to mind.

Pardons is a subject which gets filed under "Things Republicans get outraged about when Democrats do it, in order to cover their own far worse transgressions of same"

That's a bit long for the old index card, so I shorten it to "Rich, Marc"

The pardon power is in dire need of a constitutional amendment. Eliminate it, reform it, make it senate confirmable I don't care, but currently it is a license to each president to order subordinates to commit crimes, then pardon them if they happen to get caught for those crimes.