King George Has A Lot To Hide, Pt. II

Earlier, I posted about White House efforts to stop legitimate Congressional investigations into the President's warrantless wiretapping activities. Their efforts to do so are only continuining to ruffle Congressional feathers and reveals much about their fears.

As Glenn Greenwald again notes, this frantic desperation to stop investigations debunks the Rove-ian talking point that the administration welcomed this debate, because they believe it's a "win" for them politically. But their actions speak louder than words. They fear this scandal and have done everything they could to keep it out of the public spotlight. They have politically threatened Republicans, made bargains with Senators, and characterized any critics as sympathizers to Al Qaeda.

Their excuse for fighting these inquiries is that investigations could betray our secrets to our enemies. Yet common sense tells you that terrorists already know we are spying on them and the basics of what such surveillance entails. Besides, no planned investigations were going to get into operational details of the program, just its legality... And that's the issue where the administration knows they are wrong. They broke the law. And their desire to squash any debates on that issue trumps their faux-tough posturing on it.

Bottom line, they are not behaving like men who are sure they are right.

Also contrary to their talking points, the fire on this scandal is coming not from partisan Democrats (who actually have been fairly silent on this one), but rather from high-ranking Republicans. Nonsensically, right-wing bloggers continue to portray this is a partisan conflict (even as Democrats remain silent); it is not. It is, in reality, a classic constitutional conflict over the issue of checks and balances. And the most outspoken critics of the President's action have been reliable Republican players like Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Chuck Hagel, among others. As proof of how genuine conservative anger over this is, when Sen. Roberts appeared to be caving to administration pressure on hearings, his hometown paper- the Wichita Eagle- wrote an editorial questioning his credibility and called him a "reliable partisan apologist for the Bush administration on intelligence and security controversies" and worrying that he seemed "prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law".

This scandal and outrage is real and even Karl Rove can't make it go away.

Now bring on the hearings.