FISA Follies



Sandy: I want you to kill every gopher on the golf course!

Carl Spackler: Correct me if I'm wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers, they're gonna lock me up and throw away the key...

Sandy: Not golfers, you great fool! Gophers! The little brown, furry rodents!

Carl Spackler: We can do that; we don't even have to have a reason. All right, let's do the same thing, but with gophers -!



What we have here is a failure to communicate...



There's an absolute plague of illegality that Congress should address. This is a matter of even greater urgency than issuing a contempt citation against Harriet Myers or even whether Roger Clemens used steroids. (He did).

I'm referring of course to the rampant, wanton disregard of red lights by ambulance drivers. Everyone knows that running red lights is against the law, and yet every day in America EMT's, thinking only about saving the lives of their passengers, violate that staute. It's time to open them up to millions of class action suits. It's going to be pretty difficult for Democrat lawmakers to continue to raise the kind of money they need to hold Congress unless the trial bar finds a new industry to pillage. The medical profession is just about tapped out and the insurance industry is learning how to defend itself. But wait... without ambulance drivers, who would they chase?

Apparently, House Democrats need to preserve the ability to launch a plague of junk, class-action lawsuits against telecom companies for the unspeakable offense of having answered their government's call at a time of great national peril. It's evidently an irresistible two-fer to on the one hand be able to speak in the high-minded terms that nitwit ACLU types who've only recently discovered a sort of misguided constitutional fundamentalism would love, while delivering a financial bonanza to their most important constituency.

It's exactly the sort of cynical ploy that so many have found dismaying, and which, to be fair, cost Republicans their control of Congress. Although, to their everlasting credit, Republicans never knowingly weakened national security to pay off an iterest group. They just loaded up bills with earmarks.

One wonders what all those newly minted Obamaniacs might think of their party if they understood just how the old sausage factory actually works.

And weakening national security is exactly what not passing the Senate bill will accomplish. Make no mistake.

We've now placed ourselves in the absurd position of needing a FISA warrant to monitor phone conversations between two foreigners both located outside the United States. Even the Senate bill severely compromises the President's inherent constitutional authority to intercept enemy communications.

Funny, huh?