Is President Bush Spying on Democrats?

This is the question that Thom Hartmann asks us to ask in his latest article. My initial reaction was that this was going a bit far, but he makes a persuasive case.

And that takes us back to Richard Nixon, the last Republican to have an active domestic spying program without judicial or bipartisan congressional oversight. The one whose Bush-like abuses led to the FISA and other, similar laws.

Nixon said he was spying on Americans to keep us safe from communists. We were in the middle of a war, after all. The Soviets were out to get us (and armed with real weapons of mass destruction), and the North Vietnamese weren't far behind. He had to spy on Americans, he said, to protect the liberties of Americans.

Problem was, he had turned the tool of domestic surveillance against his political enemies (and those who weren't, like journalist Daniel Schorr, but whom he believed were). Nixon was spying on Democrats, and trying to cover it with the fig leaf of "national security."

. . . Remember November of 2003? Using naked political espionage, Bush Republicans used intelligence gained in an illegal spying operation to outflank Democrats.

Republicans in the Senate - including a staffer for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch - hacked into the computers of several Senate Democrats, including Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin. Reading Kennedy's and Durbin's correspondence, the Republican operatives discovered the strategy the Democrats intended to use to attack Republican high court nominees. They leaked fifteen bits of Kennedy's discussions to The Wall Street Journal and other Republican-friendly sources, who used the information to successfully trash and thwart the Democratic plans.

That's a very good question - what exactly have President Bush and his fellow Republicans done to earn our trust in this matter? It seems like they've been willing to use these tools for political ends in the past. What's changed?

For more thoughts on this important subject, check out this Tom the Dancing Bug Comic.

Can the President Commit a Crime?

From Geov Parrish's latest article.

. . . the Bush NEI leak rationale follows an all-too-familiar theme: Bush cannot break the law, because Bush is the law. He can't leak a document, because if he says it's OK to release the document it's therefore by definition not a leak. Just like torture is illegal except when George says it's not. Or warrantless domestic wiretapping is illegal, except when he authorizes it.

Bush and the people around him appear to have genuinely believed, for at least the four and a half years since 9-11, that the President by definition is incapable of breaking the law. On his sole authority laws can be ignored, overridden, or changed.

Are we a nation of laws or of men? Ruben Bolling, of Tom the Dancing Bug fame, gave the answer several years go.

Lucky Ducky

Tom the Dancing Bug is always great, but todays comic is pretty brilliant even by his standards. And it teaches a valuable lesson.