Making America Safe Again for Spying

Introduction

As not much has changed over the years in how the Federal government carries out its responsibilities to watch out for threats to the security of the US, its territories, and its citizens, some people might wonder why the recent (and continuing) revelations of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks have triggered such a vehement reaction on both sides of the political spectrum. I propose that what has changed isn't what we know the government is doing, but how confident we are that the government's behavior will not harm us.

Background

Spying is an ugly word. It implies secrecy and dishonesty. A soldier in civvies or caught wearing the other side's uniform was typically accused of spying. Foreigners caught trespassing within the borders of certain countries are often accused of spying. The punishment for spying tends to be far more harsh than the damage done. In the past the punishment was death. These days the punishment is typically a lengthy prison sentence. Our current laws on spying (1917 Espionage Act with many amendments) were established during the First World War, in response to anti-war activists in the USA. The only people ever executed under the Act were the Rosenbergs, in 1953.

So we're definitely against spying. At the same time we do it ourselves. The CIA was established in 1947. Each of the military branches (yes, even the Coast Guard) has their own military intelligence divisions. Lincoln didn't like spying, but General Hooker established the Army Military Intelligence Division in 1863. The NSA grew out of the AFSA, established in 1949. It wasn't as famous as the CIA at first, but at least right now it is the single largest intelligence operation we've got.

Evidently then spying is an area where a decided double standard exists. We don't like others to spy on us, but we will expend a considerable amount of resources to spy on others. This post is not about the moral quandary created by the double standard, though.

Americans value their privacy. The history goes back to colonial times, when collecting evidence against persons suspected of wrongdoing involved practices that ranged from bursting into someone's home unannounced and without any sort of warrant, to torture. The legacy of this time consists of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. Among other things the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless searches. As a result, law enforcement personnel must submit to court supervision, and evidence that is collected in violation of the law usually cannot be used in the prosecution of suspects.

In practice this looks a little bit different, in that SCOTUS's decisions in search cases seem to be based on if they like the petitioner rather than any consistent rule, but this post is not about SCOTUS's inability to formulate a unifying principle on the Fourth Amendment's search clause.

To date when Americans have faced the prospect of being searched, their reactions have been fairly equanimous. While the feds were hunting for contraband alcohol during prohibition, folks knew there was the possibility of having your mail opened or your telegrams read, but didn't seem to mind too terribly. During the Red Scare everyone knew the FBI were infiltrating trade unions and gun clubs, but there was little outrage. People found that their cars could get searched for drugs starting with Nixon's War on Drugs, and the Justice Department's efforts to crack down on internet child porn mean that laptops, phones, and memory sticks carried over the border are subject to searches without needing a warrant.

Essentially, Americans expect law enforcement to search, and as long as the search doesn't cross certain boundaries, we seem to be willing to endure it, knowing that the purpose was to catch evil doers, and we knew that would not be us.

The FISA Era

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was a response to Nixon's administration, in an effort to make the government once again accountable to its citizens, and make that accountability believable.

Nixon's offenses were many, but his abuse of his powers of office to spy on his opponents is the one that caused Congress to write a number of laws that were supposed to protect American civil society from the unsupervised use of the powers of surveillance. FBI and CIA operatives had to go through channels to talk to each other. The CIA's prohibition against operating in the USA or against US citizens was reinforced. And, as one might expect, the administrations following Nixon (first Ford, then Carter) complained mightily that they could no longer perform essential functions of intelligence collection under these new laws.

So the FISA law was enacted in 1978. It established a way for intelligence agencies, particularly the NSA, to continue to collect information, with court supervision, but in an environment that maintained the secrecy that is essential to spying - you don't want the people you're spying on to know you're doing it, and not just because spying is an ugly word that makes you look dishonest.

Still, few complained. Ostensibly the Feds were only checking up on foreigners, and the secret court established by FISA would make sure that in the event US citizens got involved the surveillance would not be warrantless. And then 9/11 happened.

Post 9/11 Surveillance

The terror attacks of 9/11/2001 were hugely embarrassing to the US intelligence community. On hindsight it was clear that they should have seen this coming, and that they had ample opportunity to stop it before it happened. But instead of correcting the bureaucratic disfunction that hindered their correct operation, the administration of G.W. Bush applied to Congress to liberalize some of the rules that supposedly had prevented the CIA and FBI from doing their jobs. As the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote, the Patriot Act was "a modest retrenchment from an overcautious interpretation of FISA."

Even so, G.W. Bush authorized wiretapping in excess of that authorized by the Patriot Act. That particular program was retroactively authorized by Congress in 2006, and the Patriot Act itself was largely re-authorized in 2008. When Obama came to office he mostly continued the surveillance programs established by his predecessor.

In principle, Edward Snowden's leaks five years later were nothing new. The Feds have always been allowed to record address information from mail sent by post. We already knew that the administration was able to and did request telephone usage records from telephone companies - SCOTUS had ruled years earlier that this required no warrant. We already knew that the 2006 FISA amendment had significantly liberalized the provisions of FISA that were ostensibly supposed to limit the amount of warrantless surveillance that US citizens could be subjected to. We already knew the Feds had ways of intercepting network traffic, and that courts had ruled that source and destination addresses and other associated information (as opposed to content) was not subject to Fourth Amendment limits on searches. We already knew the FBI was making a liberal use of the National Security Letter to gain access to information.

Perspectives

But if nothing new had been revealed, why is Snowden being pursued by the Feds for spying? Why are so many Americans upset about Snowdens' revelations? Why are US IT service providers losing customers over the prospect of having their data examined by the NSA?

One thing has changed. That is the perception that the Federal government is accountable to its citizens. This perception received its first blow under Nixon, when it was revealed repeatedly that Washington often did things that violated the principle of accountability. There were the Pentagon Papers, Tuskegee, and then there was Watergate. Congress reacted by passing various laws that were meant to reestablish our confidence that the Feds were working for us, not against us.

And then came the burgeoning use of no-knock warrants, Reagan, who started the program of extraordinary rendition (kidnapping people to send them to places where they could be tortured and detained without the benefit of constitutional protections), and an increasing rate of BATF, DEA, and ICE raids in the dark of night with occasional tragic consequences, all practices that were only escalated by later administrations. Under Reagan and succeeding administrations the state secrets privilege was invoked repeatedly in court to prevent the victims of the Federal government's actions from gaining relief, and to prevent citizens from examining what the government was doing, or stopping the government from doing it, to the point where under G.W. Bush as well as Obama petitioners now cannot even prevail by referring to practices that are generally known, but that the Feds don't want to talk about.

This is not to suggest that the Feds have become a dictatorship beyond the reach of the law - these terrible acts - kidnapping, torture, even summary execution - are committed, at least most of the time, with the intent to protect Americans from terrorist acts at home and abroad. (Well, and to protect the jobs of the politicians who might otherwise get yelled at if anything bad happens.)

But the lack of transparency prevents citizens from having confidence that the Feds are in fact doing this for good reasons. Under G.W. Bush already a considerable amount of resistance mounted. The FISA amendments of 2006 passed, but not without a lot of controversy. The Patriot Act was renewed in 2008, but, again, not without resistance. And while Obama was portrayed by opponents as a liberal his administration has continued and even escalated most of the surveillance programs that G.W. Bush started.

Coalition

Over the past two administrations it would seem that if citizens should oppose surveillance, they should have started in 2002. But, while there was some resistance at the beginning, it was always perceived as partisan opposition. People didn't pay attention to complaints about surveillance under G.W. Bush, because those were just the liberals and Democrats. And people didn't pay attention to complaints under Obama because those were just the conservatives and Republicans. And racists, of course.

But now both liberal civil libertarians as well as law and order conservatives suddenly find themselves on the same side of this issue. The first group had initially believed that Obama's campaign promises of "Change" would end what they perceived as the previous administration's intrusions and abuses. The second group found that with a black Democratic president they were much more concerned about how the Feds would use their powers than they had been under a white Republican president.

Conclusion

So that's where we stand now. The administration believes it is doing nothing wrong, mostly because it is doing nothing wrong, as far as the laws Congress has passed are concerned, and as far as SCOTUS decisions over the past thirty years go.

But at the same time the administration continues to cloak its activities in secrecy. There is no law and no court precedent that might make Americans confident that surveillance activities would not catch them up in the Feds' anti-terrorism efforts, innocent, but with no way to defend themselves against prosecutorial overreach and a stack of laws that seem to make just about everything we do potentially illegal.

No matter how prettily Obama explains himself, trust would seem to be impossible under these circumstances. There might be ways out of this impasse, but it's doubtful that this administration can find such a way. Congress might find a way to act, but that, too, seems to be a long shot. It seems unavoidable that we'll enter the 2016 election season with an unprecedented level of distrust between Americans and their government.

And that can't be good.

Getting a Handle on Handel

I play second fiddle in a small community symphony. I enjoy music, and even if I don't play well myself, the music we make as a group is a lot of fun. This time of year (around Christmas) we play in at least two performances: one for Christmas, and then there's a long running (over twenty years, I think) tradition of putting on a Messiah sing-along.

I'm also an atheist. How should I respond to the accusation that I betray atheists in some fashion by participating in a transparently religious celebration?

I don't think I have a good answer. I enjoy the music. David Blackbird, an amazingly talented and thoughtful man of my acquaintance, pointed out at one time, "when you sing about Frosty the Snowman, are you telling everyone you believe in magical top hats? No? So why should singing about Jesus suggest that you believe in a magical carpenter's son?"

That was good enough to make me feel better about singing "Silent Night" and playing my arm sore at Christmas concerts. But it really isn't a convincing argument that a Christmas concert put on by a community group that receives tax monies from a city government is not violating the First Amendment's prohibition of "respecting an establishment of religion."

Maybe Fox' Bill O'Reilly came to my rescue the other day. In an interview with American Atheists' Dave Silverman O'Reilly tried to avoid the accusation that when a government entity supports Christmas it is legitimizing a religious holiday by suggesting that Christianity is not a religion. It's a worldview, or a philosophy, according to O'Reilly. The Catholic Church is a religion. Baptists are a religion. But Christianity is not a religion.

However, I'm sorry to say that it is obvious to everyone that Bill O'Reilly was being disingenuous (again). There may be definitions for worldview or philosophy that would allow us to include Christianity, but those don't change the fact that Christianity is also a religion, and that it is what the Constitution's First Amendment refers to when it prohibits making laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof."

After all, if Christianity were not a religion, then it wouldn't be unconstitutional to make a law prohibiting the practice of Christianity. "In the interest of preventing the formation of groups holding extremist views, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are banned. Persons caught practicing or promoting these worldviews or philosophies, or found to give material aid to anyone practicing or promoting these worldviews, will be prosecuted under the Patriot Act's penalties for acts relating to terrorism." For an atheist like me it sounds like a good idea, but I bet Bill O'Reilly wouldn't go for it.

Not the Christianity part, anyway.

So I'm still left with a quandary. I suppose a city government can put up lights and seasonal decorations, arguing that they promote shopping and a civic spirit, which is good for the businesses that pay taxes in the city. They might even get away with supporting a community orchestra that plays Christmas tunes in public venues, like the community senior center, or the city library's auditorium. I think it even is OK when the performances are in churches and seminaries as long as the public is admitted regardless of religious affiliation.

When the same question is asked about the Messiah it gets a little more ticklish. Most Christmas carols are familiar enough tunes that they are arguably folk songs. The Messiah, however, is not like that. The Messiah was written in 1741, when Handel was at something of a low point in his career. He had been reasonably successful writing fairly conventional music, and he really wanted to try his hand at something new. But after months of having nothing to show for his time his funds were running low and he had to produce something to make the cash registers ring again. So when his friend and longtime collaborator Jennens approached him with a libretto he had written as an explicit response to deists (yes, the same kinds of deists that are responsible for our Constitution's disestablishmentarianism), Handel tossed together a few dozen bits of baroque elevator music, which were then performed for the first time around Easter 1742 in Dublin.

OK, describing the pieces as baroque elevator music sounds a bit cavalier, but, seriously, critical acclaim for originality or compositional structure is not something you'll be hearing about the Messiah, no matter how much fun it is to listen to, even if you consider Handel's original arrangement (which most performances, including ours, are not). Plus, from its origin the piece is effectively a refutation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. That makes it special in this context.

Finally, there is a fair amount of effort to select pieces from the work that suit the theological understanding of the participants, rather than the poetic value of the lyrics or the compositional integrity of the music. Some sections that make theological references that are unfamiliar to American Protestants are not even included in typical American publications of the work, or are set aside into an appendix. The work is clearly far more religious in nature than, say, "Rudolf the Rednosed Reindeer" or even "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem."

So I have no very good answer. I probably won't be playing this year because I've injured my arm. Last year, however, I participated, and I will be there next year, too, if they'll let me. The music, however hackneyed and unoriginal it may be to a musicologist, is just too much fun to give it a pass.

I definitely have mixed emotions regarding the new health care reform bill. I don't know everything that's in it, yet, but what I do know bothers me intensely.

Perhaps I think of the entire health care issue a bit differently from most people?

For me health care is a public policy issue similar to the way we deal with fire departments, public school, or national parks. In other words, the choices we make here have an effect on all of us, not just on those of us directly involved. A house that burns down isn't just a problem for the home owner. People who don't know how to read or write in our modern world aren't just a problem for themselves. Losing the areas we've designated as national parks doesn't just mean fewer places to go and enjoy nature. And like them, people without adequate health care are not just a sad story to read about. The effects are far reaching, both economically and socially.

It's not like some people want to characterize it: we need to be nice to each other and take care of each other. I mean, that'd be nice, too, but adequate health care for everyone is necessary for rather more bloody minded, hard headed reasons.

So I see the whole thing as a three part problem.

1. Health care is too damned expensive. Bills are itemized down to the fare-thee-well. You're charged for a change in rubber gloves, for every single aspirin, and the charges are outlandish. Every doctor and p.a. that has a poke at you submits their own bill. If you walk out with something like a pair of crutches you may well end up getting a bill from some medical supply store in Timbuktu.

   Didn't use to be like that.

2. Insurance is about risk management. Now, you might argue that you don't take risks, so you should pay less for your insurance than others who take more risks. Or perhaps you're willing to bear a greater risk. But that flies in the face of the economic realities of health care. Risk management works best when the entire population is included, rather than allowing groups to take some kind of privileged position.

   In other words, a single payer system that has the entire US population as subscribers is what will be most efficient and most effective at managing the cost of health care.

   Yup, no choice. But you're trying to hold onto an illusion of choice. It's not a real choice. Whatever insurance plan you currently have is governed by actuarial tables, coupled with some sort of commitment of profits to investors. Everything else devolves from there. Your own input here only means something if you incur catastrophic expenses that will have to be paid for by the part of the system outside of your insurance plan. And that's precisely the problem.

3. The tail is wagging the dog. The reason why there's even a question about how we deal with the health care issue is because there are far too many people making money doing everything but providing health care, and any attempt to change that is bound to generate a lot of opposition from a lot of very wealthy people who are trying to maintain the status quo. About 2/3 of all the money spent on health care goes here.

   But in one respect health care reform has to deal with that: these millions of people currently employed doing everything from collecting payments to denying health care can't actually be tossed out into the streets by closing down the likes of Blue Cross Blue Shield, right?

Essentially, a health care plan has to do all of that.

It needs to find a way to return medical billing to sanity. Do away with the practice of charging $1,000 for a hang nail, all but $50 of which ends up being disallowed by the insurance plan anyway.

A single payer system means that you will be able to get medical care whenever you need it, and, more importantly, providers of medical care don't need to inflate costs to recoup from people with the ability to pay the money they lose on the people who don't have the ability to pay.

The hard part would be re-purposing the machinery currently devoted to inefficiency and greed, the health insurance companies and their employees. I gather there's a shortage of nursing staff and doctors. Hey, I have an idea.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the recently passed health care bill does practically none of all that. I know, the Senate version is still to come, and then there's final conference version... I wouldn't be surprised to find that it makes some things worse.

So that's why I have these mixed emotions. Should I be happy that we had movement of any kind on this issue? Or should we have scrapped this bill and tried again later?

Sometimes the shiny new present turns out to be not at all what you thought it was.

For reasons unrelated to the inauguration on Tuesday I was listening to classic rock, including The Who. Just before Obama gave his inauguration address, the song "Won't get fooled again" came on. I paused the song and turned on the sound to Obama's speech.

It was a nice job of speechifying, I thought. I enjoyed it when Obama gave Bush and the neo-cons their well deserved and public spanking. I liked Obama's retelling of the American Myth. I took the whole thing to be what it was intended: a spectacle to signal to the Rest of the World that the USA was still in business, and that a new hand was guiding the Ship of State.

Throughout the speech the camera switched from views of Obama at the podium to views of the crowds thronging the Mall. People with hopeful faces. The song I had just been listening to kept swirling through my mind as background to Obama's speech.

When the swearing-in was done with and the nattering nabobs of the media took their turns telling us what we'd just watched, I muted the stream and returned to my music. Next came the great guitar bridge from the song, followed by the last two lines, which sounded disturbingly prophetic: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

I am by nature an optimistic person, but news items like this one from WiReD (which detail how Obama's administration is unlikely to return to principles of accountability, at least as far as the government's ability to spy on citizens without a warrant is concerned) certainly help to sober me up.

So Ann Coulter's broken her jaw. (Yes, I know that was more than a month ago.)

No one seems to want to say exactly how.

Which isn't to say that folks aren't willing to make wisecracks about it.

What no one mentions is that someone with their jaws wired shut can still talk perfectly well.

So is someone hoping she'll break her hands, next?

Anyway, the funniest comment appeared in Tom Tomorrow's "Year in Review." Go there and admire it for yourself.

Fred Thompson has some thoughts on how Congress is dealing with the current economic crisis.

What he doesn't say is that current mess isn't the first of its type in recent memory.

Those of us who have a memory span that slightly exceeds that of a gerbil with lead poisoning may recall the Savings and Loan scandal, where the Bush (#41) administration and Congress set up the "Resolution Trust Corporation" to bail out S&Ls to the tune of over a trillion bucks.

The names will sound familiar, though. Like John McCain, who was rebuked in the Senate for his role in shielding Charles Keating from the consequences of bad management. And, before people accuse me of partisanship, Cranston, Riegle, DeConcini, and Glenn, all Democrats, got in trouble alongside McCain. I guess that's what made McCain a maverick?

Or Neil Bush (one of Dubyas many brothers), who was accused of skimming money from his failing S&L.

Anyway, the point is, this current mess is not like the Depression. It's more like what happened *before* the Depression. You all remember the Roaring 20s? When that bubble burst and the markets crashed, bankers (gotta love 'em!) said that people would just have to suck up the margin calls and ride out the market. Sound familiar? They didn't want intervention, because they were afraid that might dilute their holdings in gold. Then they discovered that you can't eat gold, and it won't build houses or cars for you...

I'm not suggesting that giving bankers $700 billion with no strings attached was a good idea. The trouble is that Congress has no idea what banks do, and there's no one in the current administration who knows much more. Even Hank, who came to his current post from Goldman Sachs and was arguably one of the many architects of this mess, doesn't really know, a fact to which he testified in congress.

Anyway, while Thompson is fun to listen to, he's just being a sarcastic know-nothing. He knows it. I wonder if everyone else does, too?

My dad loves to use the word "mainstream media." It's a funny thing, that word. It implies that there's some other sort of media, not "mainstream," which is somehow more salient, more balanced, better informed.

My dad's a smart guy, smarter than me in many ways, but this is one bit where he along with most liberals and conservatives who like to use this word are living in a fantasy land.

Oh, sure, we can point out that the likes of Wolf Blitzer, about as mainstream as they come, has used the platform of the presidential debates to ask over 3,000 questions. Six of them were about global climate change. Some of the other questions that were asked concerned UFOs and Chuck Norris.

I think it doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative or whatever, that's got to look bad.

Consider that, if global climate change is in fact a non-issue, and the next president decides to get all medieval about carbon footprints and the like, we'll be paying a steep price for a scientific boondoggle.

Or, if global climate change is real, and the next president decides to instead indulge in an endless series of studies financed by Mobil Oil, the price will be equally steep, if not steeper. It seems this is the sort of question where we need to know what a future president will do.

Compared to that, Chuck Norris and flashing lights in the sky aren't really in the running, are they?

So how are the non-mainstream media doing?

Well, Weekly World News just interviewed the bat boy...

But that's not who we mean by non-mainstream media. We mean people like the redoubtable Erick Erickson who blogs on RedState.com, right? One of the pioneers of journalism, a true patriot forging into the wilderness of political chaff, to return with morsels of Truth!

Um.

Sorry, I think I got carried away, there. Where was I?

Oh, yes, Erick Erickson. I listened to him talk about Barack Obama this morning. Clinton, he said, was a policy person. Obama, on the other is a Big Idea person. Erickson's words were along the lines of policy would bore Obama and his fans.

Yes, folks, there you have it. Insightful political analysis the way you won't find it in the New York Times.

Incidentally, wasn't the "Big Idea" thing what made Dubya such a great guy? I mean, he can't watch TV and eat pretzels at the same time, but policy bores him, so that makes him alright.

Just a thought.

Sometimes my liberal friends manage to really pick up the wrong end of the stick. So I got this link sent to me, along with the following comments from MoveOn:

"[...]if you're as amazed, saddened, and angered as we are—pass it on to a friend, neighbor, or co-worker and help make sure people all over the country see it."

Who's amazed or angered?

This was the reply from Bush I when questions were asked why it seemed that we were encouraging the Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Sadam but didn't provide any material support when it came to the smackdown. You may remember stories of Iraqi government helicopters strafing Shiite villages and of Kurds fleeing into the highlands on the Turkish side of the border where they froze and starved. Did we abandon our allies in Iraq?

Under Bush I the answer was that it was not expedient to do more, so we didn't do more.

Under Bush II things had changed a little. We'd looked at eight years of Iraq bashing, with the people of Iraq really getting the worst of it, and regime change didn't look likely, and then there was 9/11. We already had a military operation under way in Afghanistan, so...

I'm not saying that Cheney was wrong both times or right both times or right one time and wrong the other or changed his mind or lied or anything of the sort. I'm just pointing out that comparing the situation in 1992 with the situation in 2002 as if the two situations were identical is not smart.

The present facts of course seem to say that this administration was wrong in invading Iraq. I'm thinking that it was not just wrong in hind sight, but also wrong ahead of time. Not because Cheney was right in 1992, but because there were many other reasons besides those he gave not to go to war. Reasons which were ignored (or considered less significant than reasons to go to war) not just by this administration, but by 90% or so of congress, and perhaps even more of this country's population.

So this "saddened and angered" stuff kind of leaves me cold. Liberals are, of course, just as bad as conservatives. Both ends of the spectrum seem to love the easy stabs at the opposition, even when they completely miss the point.

OK, anyone who reads my posts knows that I despise the current administration's scare tactics and their fascist methods. Now I read this:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's internal network security practices are a mess, according to a report by the General Accountability Office. In a report released on Thursday, the GAO said "certain information security controls over the critical internal network reviewed were ineffective..." (GAO: FBI needs a lesson in network security)

See, this is what I'm talking about. These guys don't really mean it. They tell us to be scared, but they aren't scared. They tell us it's a dangerous world, but they don't protect themselves. They subject us to history's single largest bureaucracy and all of the excesses and outrages that go along with that, but they themselves ignore it all.

It's pretty clear. When you're told the barking sound from the basement is a dog, but you find no evidence of dog food or leash or even so much as a turd on the lawn, then you're probably listening to a foley artist.

As David Horowitz will tell you, Republicans have a big tent, big enough to fit many different ideas. He tells you that to contrast his party with the Democrats. The Democrats do not have a big tent, says David.

Well, I like big tents.

Which is why, when Republicans in Utah required voters to be registered with their party to vote in the Republican primaries I promptly registered. Those close minded Democrats didn't require registration, so I didn't bother with them.

Ever since then I've been getting lot's of love from my friends in the GOP. I get to write editorials that start with "as a registered Republican", and people pay attention. I get Republican newsletters and even Republican spam!

So today I received the annual survey from the Republican National Committee. It is full of opportunities to express my opinion on important GOP matters:

1. If Democrats try to gut the USA Patriot Act...

   Pen in hand I got ready to mark Yes, but then I read the rest of the question:

   ...and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

   Um. Wait. The Patriot Act is that bit of fascist legislation that no one actually read when it was first passed, right? Those of us fighting to retain our freedom from intrusive government were pretty upset about it. So that's bad. We voted out some of those who supported that law, in part because of that support. But what's that about "other important laws"? The Democrats are trying to gut other important laws? Which ones? This is the first time I've heard of that.

   So, no, Republicans shouldn't fight back. They should get behind that effort and push. Aren't we for freedom, and against oppressive government? I know the tent is big enough for a little freedom, at least.

2. Should we stop the Democrats from cutting funding for our intelligence agencies...

   No, that doesn't sound good at all. We need well funded intelligence agencies, otherwise we'll have more disasters like Iraq and Korea. But wait, there's more:

   ...or bringing back Clinton-era restrictions in inter-agency communications?

   It's a funny thing about that Clinton era. It seems to go back about 35 years. I never knew he was in office that long. But I do know why we had those restrictions. One word: Nixon. No, he didn't impose them, but his abuses required them. You know, politically motivated fishing expeditions, targeted IRS audits, warrant less wiretaps. That sort of thing.

   Not that anyone has tried warrant less wiretaps or politically motivated fishing expeditions since then. Right?

   Mind you, the CIA, NSA, and FBI should probably share information where appropriate. Why they're still not doing it, almost 6 years after 9/11, is a mystery, especially since my Big Tent party has been in power all that time, and even created the single largest government bureaucracy ever in the history of the world to do the job.

   OK, one more.

3. Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?

   Um. No?

   I mean, that sounds like a great idea, except that, you know, we won't be hitting the individuals or organizations who don't like us. Instead we'd be giving them even more reason not to like us, and giving a considerable boost to their recruiting.

   "Look at America," they'll say. "They kill women and children because they happen to be Muslim." Because, you know, it's Muslim countries we're talking about. Not to put too fine a point on it, we're talking about Iran. Anyway, if we do, then people will flock to their cause.

   So. No.

The survey is 23 question long, all along about the same lines. Whoever wrote it was pretty sure of his opinion, and figured no one in the Big Tent could possibly disagree with him. We all see where that lead over the past seven years.

Anyway, I filled it out and sent it in. I'm glad the Big Tent includes me. Otherwise who would set them straight?

When you've put yourself into a bad situation, is it proper to blame someone else for your errors?

Because that's what I think is going on in Congress these days. Because of the way the '06 elections turned out everyone is convinced that they've got to stand up against the war in Iraq.

Even the folks who originally voted for the war.

Hillary Clinton tells everyone who asks that the president lied to us, and that's why she voted for the war.

Well, maybe.

But exactly what would have been different if the president hadn't lied to us?

Wouldn't we still be stuck in Iraq, WMDs safely found and neutralized (if we were lucky), but bedeviled by a culture and a conflict that our leadership seems incapable of understanding, with thousands of our kids in coffins, tens of thousands wearing plastic arms and legs, and who knows how many Iraqis dead or maimed?

From where I'm standing it makes no difference at all. You voted for war, dammit! War isn't a nice, safe prescription for solving problems. If you didn't know that back in 2002, that's not the president's fault. If it's an intelligence failure, its the intelligence of people who were entrusted to make these kinds of decisions which failed. If it was the result of delusion or wishful thinking, it didn't originate in the White House, but in the minds of hundreds of Representatives and Senators most of whom never even served a day in the military, and the vast majority of whom do not have any close family members in harm's way.

Everyone who voted for the war bears full, entire responsibility for all of the misery that has resulted from it, and all of the misery that is sure to result from it in the future.

It's time they started admitting it, starting with, if you please, presidential candidate and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton.