Left's Campaign of Distortion and Lies Continues Unabated

Bush’s Snoopgate
The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times’ eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper’s editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn’t just out of concern about national security.

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Updated: 6:17 p.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005

Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

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This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

I hate to give an unethical slime thrower like Alter all of this space, but it is illustrative of what the Left in their desperation is willing to do to achieve what Alter finally admits to in that last paragraph, impeachment. Nothing new hear, Alter and his ilk have been striving toward that end without pause since Al Gore first conceded the race in 2000. Alter has no noble goal, he knows that no ones civil rights were violated. He is fully aware that all of these taps were warranted, particularly given the new type of war in which we find ourselves. No, his goal is a simple one, one he has had from the first, destroy George Bush. That has been the goal of the Left from day one. That is why it has been so frustrating for us on the Right. We have watched again and again as the President and other good natured and well intentioned Republicans have sought to work with their Demcrat counterparts in Congress, only to be slapped down. You cannot work through such unreasoned hatred. You can pray for them; you can wish them well, but you cannot trust them to work with you. They will always betray you because their political goals are more important to them than is your friendship. Alter you are a pitiful creature.

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