Daniel Henninger:
…For awhile after 9/11 the war on terror was a serious national enterprise. Then it entered a twilight zone between the reality of terrorist killing and the abstractions of our domestic politics. The subject became a kind of political video game in which political partisans–the press, the pols, the bureaucracies–attempt to splatter each other. The best-selling version of the game has been Warrantless Wiretaps, introduced for political playstations by the New York Times.
The Times reported in December that President Bush had authorized a “secret” National Security Agency program run by Gen. Hayden to monitor international phone calls related to al Qaeda. Like most video games, the story line of Warrantless Wiretaps is crudely simple: President Bush sits at a console of electronic surveillance programs and tries to demolish “our most basic civil liberties,” eviscerate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and trample the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The person who has scored the most points playing Warrantless Wiretaps is GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, just ahead of Democratic presidential gamer Sen. Russ Feingold. The rest of the country has shown little interest in Washington’s new game. In opinion polls about the NSA’s surveillance programs, strong majorities essentially say, So what?
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