Thoughts on wiretaps

I haven't got much, aside from some simmering outrage at the right-wing attempts to re-brand president Bush's lawbreaking as patriotic defense of the country. What is this country beyond its principles, I ask? Because he sure isn't protecting those. Via mcjoan at Kos, Eugene Robinson:

The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.

Maybe the administration believe in the sort of defense of America as espoused by some characters in Syriana, that we ought to sustain at any cost the American lifestyle. I think that's a pretty base view of what this nation is, that to equate America with unfettered consumption is to make a mockery of the freedoms people have always come here to find. We shouldn't sacrifice something so precious as privacy for the kind of security Bush has in mind.