Much ado has been made about President Bush's directives to the NSA to wiretap some terrorism suspects without first getting a warrant from the FISA court. If you listen to the Left, you'll get gleeful accounts of how crazy, wrong, and dishonest this president has been regarding this whole program. Liberals very clearly think they have caught the president red-handed doing illegal things.
Listen to people who know the law and have studied this case, however, and you get a far different viewpoint. Some conservatives are not totally convinced of the program's legality, and others are thoroughly convinced. None that I have seen, who have studied the case law honestly, are out there calling for impeachment, as the liberal democrats are.
John Hindraker's piece at PowerLine blog should serve as the definitive (and exhausting to read) bit on the legality of the program. And Andrew McCarthy's piece at National Review is both compelling and funny. And Ann Coulter weighs in, as well, in her usual acerbic way. Here is the beginning of that rant:
I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.
With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war... In previous wars, the country has done far worse than monitor telephone calls placed to jihad headquarters. FDR rounded up Japanese — many of them loyal American citizens — and threw them in internment camps. Most appallingly, at the same time, he let New York Times editors wander free.
She never fails to "put it out there" and stir the pot.
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