People who care a tad bit more have certainly digested and spit out a phlemball of analysis on the recent flap over the Presidents' Thirty Authorizations. I'm going to play it like a numbers game, as I usually do, but in the end toss it back at W. I don't like it.
Anybody in Project Management knows the evils of scope creep. That's when you set out to do something and because nobody is quite sure what the beast you're building is going to look like at the end, they keep throwing in little things. If scope creep were allowed at the pizzaria, instead of a pepperoni cheese pizza, you end up with a pepperoni cheese pizza, pulled out of the oven 3 times to add anchovies, olives and chicken. But since you have to cook the chicken first, you get burnt cheese and underdone chicken. In the end the whole pizza tastes like crap, you've spent too much and pissed off the Italian guy. Fortunately most of the Italian guys I knew in Brooklyn wouldn't take all that crap, and they wouldn't take the pie out of the oven to add new stuff. Unfortunately, we've never fought a War on Terror before, and Congress and the public are meddlesome.
It has been four years and we still haven't lost as many soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as we lost civilians on 9/11. As significant as that is, the excuse of 9/11 has provided a whole lot of cover for a massive change in the government bureacracy. You would think that by now the plan to deal with this War On Terror would have some farily specific guidelines - all strictly legal. But no. We have scope creep. Given that Bush won his second term, it's difficult to tell whether it is Bush's pigheadedness or the electorate's meddlesomeness that is driving Bush to put on whatever toppings on this strategic pizza. After all, we demanded that he connect the dots - and that meant connecting intelligence agencies. So today the FBI is connected with the NSA. Whereas the FBI's domestic spying is not a matter of concern, using the NSA to do that breaks down an interagency firewall that has been around since day one. The dorkwads on NPR had the nerve to compare this type of domestic surveillance to Nixon's dirty tricks, making me stop to wonder if their reporters are that stupid or that biased. (I think it's a hefty scoop of both faults). Still, I don't like scope creep and that's what this feels like.
Dare I say 'incompetence'? George W. Bush gets a fair amount of credit from me, but one thing he is not is a brilliant administrator. Nor do I believe that he's using his political capital to defend brilliant administrators. It's all spent on his corner of the White House. So when it comes to managing the Federal bureacracies, I know he runs roughshod all over their professions. Career government employees hate W as a boss, and I sympathize with them.W doesn't master the details and government bureaucrats live on details. These are the details that keep coming to bite him in the butt.
I'm in agreement. in principle, with the concept. If enemies of the state are in Wisconsin, then bug Wisconsin. I also think that despite all the noise some activists have made over airport security, our civil liberties have done just fine since 9/11. I still hate to take off my shoes, and I'm not even convinced that the TSA is making me safer. After all, most of the masterminds of AQ are killed or captured and yes Iraq is still the central front in the WOT. But the Bush Administration is pushing its luck, and every inch they take which pushes the boundaries of executive privilege is particularly irksome, even dangerous. I recognize that this is a particular privilege that the President ordered a long time ago, but it still feels like scope creep. What we have is a no-account Congress whose slatternly ways have not been effective in doing anything but raise pointless points against this imperial president. They keep indicting themselves for a lack of oversight in every finger they point at the President. In the end it's embarrassing to see all the things he is doing thrown back in his face. Why? Because all this sniping does nothing to make an effective policy. It just satisfies critics who take the letter of the law to be wise.
What is clear to me, having heard out a couple Constitutional scholars on the matter of FISA authorizations is that this is a matter of responsibility that Bush is going to have to take. It's not a brazen violation of the 4th Amendment, but technically it could be interpreted as such. But nobody is going to enjoin the President or impeach the president for piercing this veil. The fallout will be mostly political, and now as the resignation of Judge Robertson shows, more corrosive of the government bureacracy. Wreckless George, wreckless.
George W. Bush has to recognize that he cannot deputize everyone in this War. Surely he has to take some extraordinary measures as the imperial president, but they should be legal. We need to win, and we will if we don't break our resolve. Nothing will break our resolve more quickly than forcing people in government to choose between lawlessness and 'total victory'. We will be happy with an ordinary victory, thank you.
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