Motus Mentis

President Bush yesterday owned up to having authorized the NSA to monitor the private communications of US citizens without first having to obtain a court order. I realize we are at war, but this is wrong, and I am angry about it. I am angry not only because it is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in the Orwellian police states we are supposedly setting ourselves in opposition to, but also because I have at considerable social cost defended the Bush administration’s foreign policy for years now, while he can’t manage to keep up his end of the bargain by not appearing at every opportunity to be exactly the conniving and hubristic autocrat his hysterical opponents claim him to be.

Obviously his political foes will seize hungrily upon this. I think it is going to be a very serious problem for him, and rightly so.

I ran across this, from Peggy Noonan, in this morning’s WSJ newsletter:

Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I’ve never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn’t it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.

Wouldn’t it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn’t it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.

I live in one of the “bluest” neighborhoods of one of the bluest cities in the nation, the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. It is a lovely place, with splendid Victorian architecture, and it adjoins one of the world’s great city parks, Prospect Park, which is right at the end of my block. We have a fascinating, complex mix of educated and creative people here. The neighborhood prides itself on tolerance and inclusion.

Our Secretary of State is feeling the heat over in Europe, where many a garment is being rent over our use of “secret” places of detention. I certainly agree that we must not violate the very principles we stand for in order to defend them, but there is a moral calculus involved that is not as simple as our disingenuous “allies” would have us think they think.