Bush on Surveillance Circa 2004

Republicans, just be glad he wasn't under oath...

"Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
- George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

Full Transcript is available from the White House:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html

Quicktime video snippet is available from this anti-Bush blog:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/bush-caught-on-tape/

In my previous NSA article, available here, I argued that Bush was in violation of the FISA statutes but within his Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief.

As much as he may be in the right as far as actions go, he may very well end up burying himself in the realm of public opinion. Like I said though, it could be worse for Bush: he wasn't under oath. And it is unlikely that he ever was when discussing wiretaps.

With his critics crying "misleading" at every possible turn on the Iraq issue, this may very well bolster their "culture of corruption" recitations. Unfortunately for Bush, his rhetorical blunders may add up to a negative impact on Republicans in general as we come ever closer to the 2006 campaign season. Even though I personally understand that he is trying to convince Average Joe voter to support doing what he believes is the right thing to do, his miscalculations seem to eventually come back to haunt him.

I once again find myself in the position of supporting an action by the Bush Administration while I watch his past statements used against those actions. The situation today is with the NSA surveillance. Before it was with Iraq invasion. I said in my post, here, on the flawed Iraq intelligence, "So regardless of Bush's rhetoric I feel this action was taken appropriately even if the public support may have been gained in less than appropriate ways." The problem is that once the public begins to hear and understand the difference between what was said then and what is known now, the public support begins to falter. Critical actions demand careful rhetoric as to not to give the opponents of that action ammunition against it later.

If this NSA program is critical to our security, which I believe it may be, then careless rhetoric that can be used to end it later is just irresponsible. Just as the Iraq war was, in my honest opinion, critical to the interests of the United States, then gaining public support for that should not use rhetoric that can be used to undermine it later by the opposition.

I wish Karl Rove was half the diabolical political genius as the Democrats think he is. Bush's speeches would be far more fine tuned to insure compatibility with potential end results. With Iraq, the uncertainty of many of our intelligence claims allowed for a unlikely but possible outcome of not finding any WMDs and addressing this possibility and using it to bolster the numerous other reasons justifying the action would have been wise. Though I doubt it, this could have made getting the authorization harder to obtain, but it would have also made the action easier to sustain on the home front. Similarly with the NSA intelligence, Bush should not have made comments denying that this kind of activity was going on. It could have made his fight to get the Patriot Act reauthorized more difficult, but I doubt it. By lying about it when he didn't have to (nobody was asking him) he just armed the opposition in their fight to destroy what he is now trying desperately to protect. A program that he claims is critical to our national security.

It would almost be forgivable if it was an unscripted, unplanned, and unexpected response to a question that caught him off guard.

Maybe I'm just irritated that the actions I support may lose popular support because of these rhetorical blunders and those actions could be terminated as a result.

End of Rant (EoR)