A Stitch in Haste

On January 24, as I documented in this post, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan put out one of his infamous "Fact Sheets" in which he and the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, General Michael Hayden, with an extremely obnoxious, condescending and patronizing tone, chided people who -- gasp! -- were indignant about warrantless wiretapping of American citizens on American soil. The NSA program was, McClellan and Hayden lectured us, not a "domestic" program at all but strictly an "international" one. Anyone who could not see the rudimentary difference between "domestic" and "international" was, McClellan and Hayden insisted, hopelessly illiterate.

Well, apparently we illiterates have a new spokesman in the form of Attorney General and chief wiretapping apologist Alberto Gonzales:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales left open the possibility yesterday that President Bush could order warrantless wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the United States -- a move that would dramatically expand the reach of a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.

In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales suggested that the administration could decide it was legal to listen in on a domestic call without supervision if it were related to al-Qaeda.

"I'm not going to rule it out," Gonzales said.

They have all become so drunk with power that they don't even try to keep their stories straight anymore. Whatever these autocrats are trying to accomplish, it is not "defending the American way of life." They are destroying it in a way the terrorists could never dream.

If I haven't said it before, then I'll say it now: Bush has unequivocally leapfrogged past Richard Nixon and may even have surpassed Andrew Jackson on the list of worst and most dangerous presidents of all time. (Yes, Jackson was worse than Nixon.)

The expiration of Bush's second term cannot come quickly enough.