1 Boring Old Man

Bush Defends Spy Program and Denies Misleading Public is hard to swallow. The essence of Mr. Bush’s statement is that he was speaking just about the Patriot Act when he talked about getting court orders, not the N.S.A. surveillance. That’s just not the truth. It’s stardard operating procedure, like Rove’s "I didn’t say her name." That aspect of the Bush Administration’s communications is now clear – they out-Clinton Bill Clinton with semantics. The lead line to that article says he denied misleading the American public. Even if he was only talking about the Patriot Act, he didn’t say that’s what he was talking about. So he did mislead the public. What he’s saying is that you can’t catch him on that one. He’s got an alibi [in the range of the dog ate his homework].

But beside his silly antics, there’s a real unanswered question in all of this. He could have done exactly what he did with a court order. I’m not even sure we would have minded him doing that kind of surveillance if he’d played it straight. We’re mad he didn’t. But that’s not the big question. It’s why didn’t he [play it straight]? They’re not fools. Why would he/they take on that much liability? Why, from the get-go did they want to do their surveillance unobserved by the courts?  They were sending big guns to the hospital to try to get a guy with pancreatitis to approve renewing the order from his hospital bed. Bush was calling in publishers and editors trying to keep them from revealing his program.

So far, there’s no explanation I’ve read that comes close to answering the question. Certainly, what President Bush and Vice President Cheney have said doesn’t answer anything. They’ve turned us all into paranoid conspiracy theorists with their lies, half truths, and secrecy, but in this case, it feels justified. There’s something they were/are doing they don’t want the courts [or us] to see. Wonder what it is?

The most tempting information so far is easy to get. Enter n.s.a.  bolton into Google, and you get a gajillion hits. It came up in John Bolton’s confirmation hearings where he acknowledged getting N.S.A. reports on government officials monitored by the N.S.A. [‘government officials monitored by the N.S.A.?’]. Bolton is the darkest of actors, the sort who is easy to suspect of almost anything – devisive, paranoid, contemptuous. His numerous pre-Bush articles [posted on the A.E.I. site] are frightening. But my guess is that there was widespread monitoring of people who fall way outside any so-called terrorist net used by lots of people. Is there a whistle blower in the house?

In the Watergate movie, it was "Follow the money." In the Bush saga, it’s "Follow the lies spin."

Update:  What is the Bush Administration Trying to Hide? adds a lot of data to these musings. I’ll not summarize the details, but the gist of things is that the court tried to say "no" to the Administration on a few occasions, and so Bush just did what he wanted to do anyway – skipping the court altogether. I wrote a post a few weeks back proposing that Bush was a spoiled brat. Looks like I got that one right. What it comes down to is:

We still don’t know what it was that Bush wanted that the court said "no" to after essentially going along with every previous Administration for a quarter of a century. But you just can’t say "no" to Bratman Bush…