Here, in a nutshell, is what's so weird about the NSA scandal. This is Jonah Goldberg responding to my post on the Rasmussen Poll (Italics his):
Klein offers what he says is a better poll question: "Do you believe the NSA should be able to listen in on your phone calls and read your e-mails without oversight, probable cause, or a warrant?"
I can see his point. But surely there's plenty of bias built into this question, too. No one is talking about tapping run-of-the-mill phone conversations. Suggesting otherwise in a poll comes pretty close to push-polling.
Wouldn't a more fair question be: "Do you believe the NSA should be able to listen in on your phone calls and read your e-mails without oversight or a warrant if you are communicating with known al Qaeda associates in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Europe or the Middle East?"
Phrased that way, I'm with Goldberg. The only problem is that I have no reason to believe his question comports with reality. How do I know the NSA is only tapping conversations including al Qaeda associates? Because the president tells me it's so? There is, after all, absolutely no agency independent of the White House exerting even cursory oversight in this process. The FISA courts were abandoned because something Bush was doing prompted the legendarily lax agency to start rejecting and amending warrants. And yet, with absolutely no independent assurance, I'm supposed to simply trust that the net isn't being incompetently, mendaciously, or accidentally widened? Why?
Blindly trusting a politician's good intentions and a bureaucracy's sound judgment hasn't historically proven the best of ideas. And Goldberg knows that. He's a leading advocate of a political philosophy that takes, as one of its tenets, a reflexive mistrust of government. And yet here he'll throw it all the way because a second set of classified but independent eyes is too much red tape on the executive? The position isn't logical. Goldberg, I assume, is simply taking his own advice and playing the role of partisan. But while partisanship is good, blind partisanship when there's no empowered counterforce is dangerous. If partisans don't possess near equal power yet all remain in their roles as apparatchiks, the whole system breaks down. And that's what's happening here. Jonah and I agree that the NSA should wiretap anyone and everyone chatting with known al Qaeda associates. What I can't understand is why we don't agree that an independent watchdog agency should be deployed to ensure that the NSA is following and accomplishing that mission.
