The anti-Bush crowd is cheering a federal judge’s ruling that the wiretapping of communications between overseas terrorists and U.S. residents is an unconstitutional infringement on American rights by a president forgetting “there are no hereditary kings in America.”
The ruling, in fact, is a joke perpetrated by someone in a state of confusion — an appointee of Jimmy Carter — whose juvenile rhetoric about Bush is more a signal of her political partisanship than evidence of endangered civil liberties.
Even experts who agree the Bush practice oversteps the bounds believe the opinion “used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions,” The New York Times reports. The judge sees this intelligence gathering as an offense against the First Amendment because it chills free speech, for instance. What’s the fear exactly? That someone in a conversation with Osama bin Laden will resort to euphemisms? “Let’s crush those infidels — I mean, misguided disbelievers — my friend.”
My own view is that the Bush program violates federal law, that Congress should authorize it and that it should be subjected to regular court review. I can see, however, why a president leading us in war would think himself obligated by commander in chief status to spy on our enemies, especially when intelligence is the foremost weapon we have to protect ourselves against terrorists. (News reports have quoted anonymous sources as saying U.S. intelligence was important in breaking up the plot in Britain to down airline flights to the United States.)
On the issue of this program, as on so many, the anti-Bush crowd does not limit itself to legitimate worries, but does loop-the-loop, leftist-angst exercises far removed from the ground of politicalreality. The frequently heard claim that Bush is engaged in an unprecedented abolition of our freedoms is hallucinatory. Some of what he has done is clearly amiss, such as the holding of two citizens without charges or a trial. But the arguments against the Patriot Act were mostly exaggerations of an updating and sharpening of reasonable law-enforcement tactics and his supposed attempt to muzzle the press was nothing more than well-deserved criticism.
Pay attention to President Bush’s missteps, but then take note of how a liberal such as journalist Elizabeth Drew agonizes in the New York Review of Books about executive overreaching when she herself advocated campaign finance laws that have done more to cheat average Americans out of their free-speech rights than any legislation in decades.
Out of political cowardice and misjudgment, Bush signed that law, but you can’t accuse him of believing in the Supreme Court’s decision that government can take your property to give to other private interests — one among many high-court decisions sucking the life out of the Bill of Rights. You can’t accuse Bush, either, of wanting to censor the Sinclair Group’s showing of a documentary on John Kerry’s youthful declaration that U.S. troops in Vietnam were war criminals. Some Democrats in Congress absolutely tried in the last presidential election to have the government prevent the firm from having its TV affiliates air what was actually an excellent piece no more opinionated than dozens of major network news effusions.
And you can’t accuse Bush of thinking commercial enterprises lack the right to defend themselves against attacks on their integrity. Many leftists think it is perfectly OK in the land of the free to tell people they can’t argue back when someone is defaming their businesses.
Both left and right can pose threats to civil liberties, but neither unjustified hysterics nor clumsy rulings from a silly judge get us anywhere.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
