A weekend full of Say What?

While I was coming back from a week's trip to Philly, NYC and Connecticut -- with a layover in Sonoma because I could not gain entry into the flooded Napa Valley -- I missed a weekend's worth of blogging.

In the meantime, W. tries to justify his illegal activities in the face of news that Justice Department officials weren't in lockstep with the NSA program, while knuckleheads at Newsweek who don't grok the Constitution -- as pointed out with suitable outrage by Armando at DailyKos -- actually say:

"In a perfect democracy trying to strike a balance between civil liberties and national security, there would be reasoned, open debate between representatives of the different branches of government. But human nature and politics rarely work in neat and orderly ways. In moments of crisis, presidents, if they believe in executive power (and most inevitably do), will do almost anything to protect the country. Only after the crisis ebbs does the debate begin over the proper means and ends, and by then the people and their representatives are often shocked to find what the president has done in the name of protecting them."

C'mon Evan Thomas, read the Constitution and notice that this has been decided and is not open to debate only after a crisis has passed. We don't need a "perfect democracy" to honor the rule of law. We need a president who will not search for a Justice Dept. hack who will tell him anything he wants to know.

We also learn from a Walter Pincus WaPo story that the Defense Intelligence Agency, along with the FBI, CIA and DHS, has gained access to information gathered by the NSA warrantless wiretap/data-mining efforts and taken that information to justify new domestic surveillance. The DIA and the CIA are legally bound not to engage in domestic spying.

Those of us who lived through the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s remember how the NSA, DIA and FBI spied on antiwar activists, leading to the FISA law being enacted. Now, the same agencies are violating FISA when they engage in the activities that led to the law in the first place. Duh.

How plain does it have to get before Americans are outraged at a gross violation of the law? And where is Congress? Hopefully only on vacation and not permanently passive.