Political Warfare
As we have said on these pages in the past, presidential politics is open warfare, and has been at least since Watergate, when a fine President with some personal flaws (as they all have) was brought down for essentially trivial reasons which did not justify undoing an election. In fact, if Nixon had only had the balls to say, in the beginning, "We screwed up," the whole thing would have blown away in a few weeks.
I believe in the concept of "loyal opposition." I thought it was wrong to go after Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton in the vicious, disrepectful, and blood-thirsty ways in which they were hounded - always searching for the scandal that would either destroy them or handcuff them. (Nobody bothered going after Carter except for the attack rabbit. Bush Sr. took a lot of gratuitous hits from the press, but the opposition did not seem determined to destroy him.)
With GW, as with Reagan, we see the opposition, with their leftist bedfellows in the press, frothing at the mouth. Let's see how many trumped-up and invented "scandals" Bush has endured: 1. He really lost Florida. 2. He really lost Ohio. 3. He caused Abu Graib. 4. He lied about Iraq so his friends could make oil money. 5. He caused Katrina to kill blacks. 6. He spies on innocent Americans. How many have I missed?
These are all calculated, opportunistic, and dishonest assaults, hoping to cause damage or to draw enough blood to attract the sharks. It's the wrong thing to do, and the "concern" is as transparently feigned and phony as can be. These president guys mean well for the country. They are normal humans, but they mean well (insofar as any politicans mean well, anyway).
I am no lawyer, but I have read the legal analyses of the NSA thing. My conclusion is that if the NSA and the CIA were not secretly monitoring foreign calls to potential terrorists, that might be cause for impeachment. That would be a true scandal. Given how easy it is to be on American soil, and how easy it is to become a citizen (far too easy for this amazing privilege, if you ask me), our spooks had better be looking for them and watching them, because there are guys out there who want nothing more than to kill you and me.
How quickly we sink into our decadent complacency.
