Profile In Perfidy

When a person demands an end yet denies every viable means of attaining it, does that person truly seek that end?

For the past week, in the wake of the narrowly-averted al Qaeda (brand) terrorist attack on ten trans-Atlantic passenger jets, the American Left has been attacking the Bush Administration for "not doing enough" to keep the homeland safe. This from the same people that opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; agitated about fictional "torture" at Guantanamo Bay, and otherwise have done everything in their power to lavish all the constitutional rights and privileges of citizenship on illegal enemy combatants; denounced profiling at every turn as "racist"; tried mightily to kill the Patriot Act; and, via the stalwart patriots at the New York Times, exposed the formerly, and necessarily, secret NSA terrorist surveillance and SWIFT terrorist finance tracking programs.

Now we have the latest denial of means, in the form of another left-wing federal judge imposing her own political views upon the law, constitutionality and precedent be damned:

Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit ruled [yester]day that the NSA's international terrorist surveillance program is unconstitutional....[A]s we've written repeatedly (for example, here), the federal courts have held on a number of occasions that the President has the constitutional power under Article II to order warrantless surveillance for national security purposes. The Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Circuits have so held, as has the special FISA Court of Review. And those cases dealt with domestic warrantless intercepts, as opposed to the international communications that fall within the NSA program.

One of the serious weaknesses of our federal judicial system is that in many cases, plaintiffs can forum-shop for a favorable district or judge. Here, the ACLU, the plaintiff in the case, could have brought the case anywhere in the United States. The ACLU naturally avoided the circuits that had already upheld warrantless surveillance as an executive power; the Sixth Circuit, which encompasses Michigan, has not ruled on the issue, to my knowledge. The ACLU was able to get its case before Judge Taylor, a 1979 Jimmy Carter appointee who was described by the Detroit Free Press as "a liberal with Democratic roots."

Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, the Baseball Crank, Brother Meringoff, and the good burghers at NRO (including the irrepressable Andy McCarthy) take turns flensing this rotting carcass of jurisimprudence. It's so bad that even a Daily Kos denizen is saying, "Whoa, wait a minute, dude."

So, then, just to reiterate: Islamist terrorists are still coming at us, the public calls for common-sense profiling, a domestic "spy" agency like Britain's MI5, and even "torture" in a situation where thousands of lives are in imminent peril (as apparently took place last week) are becoming deafening, and the Left, as evinced by the judge-shopping American Communist Lackeys Union and their eager and willing client, STILL stands stubbornly astride the road to safety and survival yelling, "STOP!", even as they continue to accuse President Bush of "making us less safe" and would blame him for the next successful attack for "failing to connect the dots."

I don't see eye to eye with Quin Hillyer on much, but he's smack on the money with his call - almost begging, really - for the President to finally, once and for frigging all, bury the accursed "New Tone" and go on the warpath against his political enemies. It'd be good for him, good for his party, and would help keep the country safe(r) by keeping power over it out of the hands of the mad quislings who would allow and even facilitate its destruction.

One could even say he would be bringing real Americans together.

Or, as Double-H put it yesterday, "Don't run for your life in the fall. Vote for your life. Every vote for a Democrat (except Joe Lieberman) is a vote against victory."

UPDATE: Daniel Henninger wonders whether Bushophobia won't be the death of us all.

UPDATE II: THIS is homeland security???