All Bray And No Bite

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

For instance, did you know that Senator Pat "Leaky" Leahy (D-VT), one of the self-righteous distorters of the NSA terrorist surveillance program, once sponsored legislation that facilitated NSA phone tapping?

In 1994 Senator Pat "Leaky" Leahy co-wrote a law that forced telecommunications carriers to build convenient wiretap features into their networks enabling the kind of telephone records collection now at the heart of the controversy over the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance operation.

In recent days Leahy has called the NSA's actions troubling and potentially illegal - saying they show that the Bush Administration is treating Americans like terrorists.

"'The secret collection of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans?" he exclaimed after USA Today blew the lid off the program last week. "Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?"

But according to the Rutland Herald, Leahy was singing a different tune 12 years ago, when he was pushing the Senate to pass his bill, the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act [CALEA].

"I suggest to senators if anybody does want to hold [CALEA] up, I hope that at this time next year, neither they nor their constituents, nor anybody they know, is a kidnap victim or victim of a terrorist, and have somebody ask why nothing can be done, and be told because a law that had probably 99% support in the House and the Senate did not pass." [emphasis added]

Leahy tried to blow this off with a lame claim that his legislation would have "required a warrant" for wire tapping, but that's not what the Rutgers Computer & Technology Journal said three years ago:

"CALEA requires a telecommunications provider to make 'its equipment, facilities, or services ... capable of ... enabling the government ... [without a warrant] to intercept ... all wire and electronic communications carried by the carrier.'" [emphasis added]

BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) claims another vitim. Hope Captain Chirps never becomes this virulent. Although, come to think of it, if Leahy and his fellow-travelers get their way, bin Laden and Ahmadinejad will kill us all before any mere influenza virus can get the chance.

Of course, some Democrats were loopy long before George Bush came along:

Senator Barbara Boxer told Mills College graduates that the United States needs to begin pulling troops out of Iraq this year.

"We went to Iraq on false pretenses, and we're staying there on false hopes - false hopes that our military can solve the age-old problems there between ethnic groups," said Boxer, D-CA "The Iraqi people simply have to want democracy and freedom as much as we want it for them. And I want an exit strategy."

Um, Senator, who says the Iraqi people don't want democracy? Where is the evidence that people like you want it for them? And isn't the strategy on which you should be focusing how to liberate Syria and Iran at the least cost before they can undo all the good we've done in Iraq and plunge the Middle East into nuclear conflagration? And when you get that strategy could you send a copy to the White House along with a kick in the butt to get them moving on it before it's too late?

Actually, if she had substituted "Kosovo" for "Iraq," Boxer would have been spot-on. Especially given that reports on the ground in the occupied Serbian province are growing more alarming by the day. But that was Bill Clinton's war, so of course that's somehow different.

It is relentless foolishness like this that keeps me convinced there will be no electoral sea change this fall. That and the continuing failure of the minority to come up with a way of camouflaging their Bolshevism to make it scammable on the American electorate, as well as, ironically, the apparently widespread dichotomy between generic disapproval of Congress as an institution versus constituent approval of local senators and representatives.

If Bush were topping the ballot in November, you could stick a fork in the GOP right now. But as long as this "all politics is local" dynamic remains in play, the Republicans, as wayward as so many of them have become and as undeserving as they might be, will remain in the driver's seat.

UPDATE: Here's an excellent summation of the aforementioned relentless foolishness from Rich Lowry yesterday:

If you don’t have human intelligence of the sort the CIA once provided, you had better have signals intelligence of the sort that Michael Hayden’s National Security Agency gathers with its controversial phone-surveillance and data-mining programs. Democrats aren’t comfortable with that either. Oddly, our country’s domestic statists tend to be national-security libertarians. They want more regulation, taxation, and spending—i.e., more state power—in every instance, unless it is an area involving protecting us from our enemies. Then, they suddenly think the government that governs least governs best.

Why this should be so is a deep question to be taken up by political philosophers (or perhaps psychologists), but it doesn’t strike most people as a sensible ordering of priorities. You can’t “connect the dots,” without dots to connect. And you find them only through surveillance, data-mining, interrogation and other methods disdained by Democrats. They are effectively anti-dot—at least until there is another attack, at which time they will bray that we should have had more dots, neatly connected.

Fools may lose elections. But lunatics and traitors do not win them.