Bush Surveillance Policy Vindicated---Yet Again

The Bush administration has won yet another round in court on its foreign intelligence surveillance. You know what foreign intelligence surveillance is. That;s the anti-terrorist techniques that Democrats have endlessly characterized as “illegal,” “lawless,” and “shredding the Constitution.”

The FISA Court of Review, the court that Conyers, Levin, Schumer and the rest were all convinced would put leg irons on Bush if he would only volunteer to let them do it, has instead been consistently finding in favor of the executive’s power to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign agents. The latest opinion states that the "directives at issue are lawful, and compliance with them obligatory." But you won’t hear much about that in the news.

Which I suppose means the Bush era is ending just the way it began, with Bush victories in rational tribunals barely reported.

In November 2000, during the Great Al Gore Election Robbery (foiled), the Bush team was winning every single legal challenge, in spite of being heard before Democratic judges (with the notable exception of cases before the 100% partisan Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court).

The Democrats sued over defective voting machines and lost. They sued over the butterfly ballots and lost. They sued that there was voter suppression—and got nowhere for an embarrassing lack of evidence. I don’t think many paid attention to all these courtroom skirmishes, because the nightly talking heads were so much more compelling. And, it was only legal geeks like me who were interested in all that legal mumbo-jumbo. Nor should we forget how the Leftist media--shedding barrels of ink for the cause--were desperate to force a victory for President Gore.

By the time the US Supreme Court got hold of Al Gore’s lawsuit, the pattern had been clear for weeks: the Gore camp, in its strategy to endlessly prolong the election recount until Bush simply gave up and let the losing man have the White House (as if), didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the U.S. Supremes ruling the way they did. Not, at least, if you had been following the pattern of frivolous legal challenges that led up to it.

Similarly with the recent hoopla over warrantless surveillance. There really was never anything controversial about the legalities of Bush’s intelligence gathering. The Democrats simply hated it, that’s all. They hated it because they hated Bush, and they hated his standing up to terrorism, the way they never would do. And because they had the powers of Congressional office, and the free bullhorn of the media, they were able to portray Bush's commonsense actions as deserving of scorn as those of the Third Reich.

And this legal decision is one more example of shame on Them and good for Bush.

A Daring Daylight Robbery

The intense scrutiny of "voter intent" resumed this morning by a five-member board charged with directing Minnesota's recount in the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democratic rival Al Franken, and the first rush of ballot rulings has unofficially put the challenger in the lead. (“Franken passes Coleman in recount, but ...”)

This really is what was intended by Al Gore and his army in the Florida recount. Between favorable rule changes and discovery of voter “intent” by Democrat election volunteers, Gore would eventually have overtaken Bush, and today we would remember 9/11 as only the first of an unanswered series of attacks on US soil by Al Qaeda, with a dithering Gore serving his first and only term as leader of the Paper Tiger of North America.

The theft was foiled, and the guy who won the majority of votes in Florida in 2000 won the state, and with it, became President. Democrats, beaten out of what they believed was rightfully theirs to steal, created the myth that Al Gore had won the election he had just lost, a myth perpetrated with the Democrats' signature contempt for the Constitutional system or fair elections. Devout believers in this myth shuffle amongst us even now--you can hear their indignant ramblings on C-SPAN every morning when they call in to Washington Journal.

I believed at the time that the 2000 Florida recount scam was as close to a perfect model, complete in every detail, of Democratic Party political theory, strategy, philosophy, and values as we would ever see. Had it succeed, and it very nearly did, at least three Hollywood scripts were in development telling the story as a fantastic "caper" genre--sort of a The Thomas Crowne Affair without the style--and Warren Beatty as the mastermind candidate. But it didn't succeed, that time.

But if you understand how Democrats handled that election, you understand the Democratic Party. Like Rommel's book on tank warfare that Patton supposedly read before beating him, a thorough book (had one ever been written, though Chapter Five of Ann Coulter's Slander comes close) about how Gore, the press, and the Democrats almost stole the election in 2000 would now be a roadmap to exactly how Democrats fool the public, deploy the media, game the system, govern, and win elections. Since that book wasn't written, people can study the same model Gore used in Florida as it was used again in Washington state in 2006 , when Democrat Chris Gregoire stole the gubernatorial election from Republican Dino Rossi.

Or, we can look at how Al Franken, right now, is stealing the election that he knows he lost on November 4.