the worst of times

As the House leadership stumbles toward tumbling on FISA—giving the Bush Administration pretty much everything it has sought in this fight—I would like to urge those who are not regular readers of Glenn Greenwald to take a look at a few recent posts—first, because they say things that I have consistently found central to this debate as I have thought and written about it over the past couple of years, and second, because they say it so damn well.

Let me give you a taste of just a few of the central points.

On Friday, after President Bush held a presser to once again dissemble and fear-monger about warrantless surveillance (I posted some video of it here), Greenwald caught the president in a rare instance of frankness:

. . . Bush is finally being candid about the real reason the administration is so desperate to have these surveillance lawsuits dismissed. It's because those lawsuits are the absolute last hope for ever learning what the administration did when they spied on Americans for years in violation of the law. Dismissal via amnesty would ensure that their spying behavior stays permanently concealed, buried forever, and as importantly, that no court ever rules on the legality of what they did. Isn't it striking how that implication of telecom amnesty is never discussed, and how little interest it generates among journalists -- whose role, theoretically, is to uncover secret government actions?

It is, I suppose, comforting to know that the president has finally cottoned to what we all knew last fall.

(continued on capitoilette)