Selective Outrage at Wiretaps

I was reminded this past week that Democrats and the New York Times are only situationally opposed to domestic wiretapping. The United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. denied an appeal by Seattle's Jim McDermott to overturn a verdict against him in a civil suit arising from his own little wiretapping escapade. Baghdad Jim now owes House Majority Leader John Boehner over $700,000.
First a little history: Ten years ago, then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich settled a series of ethics complaints filed against him by Democrats, who were still bitter that he had engineered their first defeat since the 1950s. A condition of the settlement imposed certain restrictions upon Gingrich. After the settlement, Gingrich conducted a teleconference with Republican House leaders on how to function within, or if you prefer, evade, those restrictions. That call included Boehner's cell phone, and the analog transmissions from that phone were illegally recorded by a politically active Florida couple, who then passed their tape on to Representative McDermott. McDermott gave copies of the tape to the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
That's against the law and the Florida couple ultimately pleaded guilty and paid a $500 fine. John Boehner gave McDermott the option of apologizing and donating $10,000 to charity as penitence. McDermott refused. Boehner sued, and won.
This story gained relevance again as Democrats continue their attempts to gain political traction over the Bush Administration's use of wiretaps to monitor communications between foreign-based terrorists and their agents in this country. As Democrats seem untroubled by McDermott's exploitation of illegally taped phone calls between Republicans, we can only conclude that Democrats consider Republicans a greater threat to Christendom than Al Qaida, and therefore less deserving of privacy than terrorists.
The other story that should have returned the National Security Agency's surveillance program to the headlines was the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee of five former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) judges who largely supported President Bush's argument that Congress did not have the Constitutional authority to limit his power to spy on our enemies. The FISA court was a creation of the paranoid 70's and was signed into law by Jimmy Carter. Bush's refusal to seek the FISA Court's blessings before listening in on enemy plots ignited a partisan and media firestorm. One of those judges who expressed doubts that Bush had broken any law was the sainted James Robertson, whom the media assured us had left the FISA court in protest of the NSA program.
Considering that the ever-vigilant-and-unbiased-media fulminated itself into an orgy of righteous indignation regarding the supposed illegality of this program at the time of its exposure, it would seem equally newsworthy to report that these former FISA judges found merit in the administration's defense of the program's legality. That does not seem to be the case. Democratic fantasies about impeachment or censure of Bush for the program receive more attention that the judges' opinions. The New York Times was so desperate to prop up the foundations of its original story that it bent its interpretation of the testimony to suggest that the judges had said just the opposite. This is hardly surprising as the reporter covering the hearings for the Times was one of the reporters who broke the original story and who received an award for his investigation. The Times ought to have considered the stake that this reporter had in preserving the original story's legitimacy when it uncritically published his most recent work.
So let's summarize. Spying on terrorists is bad. Spying on a political opponent is no big deal, provided that the spy is a Democrat and the victim is a Republican. Speculation upon the illegality of spying upon terrorists is worthy of front page, top of the hour news coverage. But revelations that spying on terrorists is a constitutionally protected presidential power that no president, not even the incompetent Jimmy Carter, can sign away, is not.
It is not at all difficult to discern a pattern in the situational ethics at work here. And just in case you need help, take into account that CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and 11 other representatives of the ever-vigilant-and-unbiased-media filed motions on McDermott's behalf.
All of the above value Al Qaida's privacy more highly than John Boehner's.