A Stitch in Haste

Never let it be said that President Bush suffers from a foolish consistency:

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order," [Bush] said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.

"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," he added.

On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use "roving wiretaps," which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.

"You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order -- and by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example," he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

But by contrast, as I mentioned in a previous post, the Vice President was always open and honest about his position regarding the warrantless wiretapping scandal, right?

Vice President Dick Cheney offered similar reassurances at a Patriot Act event in June 2004, saying that "all of the investigative tools" under the law "require the approval of a judge before they can be carried out."

I suppose next will be the "Santa Claus" defense -- we lie to you to make you feel good. And of course these statements were not made under oath, so, like the pervert president before him, there was, technically, no perjury by Bush.

Either that or we will merely be subjected to the tired old "we must do anything to defend our way of life" platitude.

What "way of life" is that again? The one where presidents lie, laws are ignored and Congress and the courts are deemed untrustworthy and unreliable nuisances?

How I yearn for the days when all we had to fight were marriage amendments.