A bad rap

Senator Feingold's censure-Bush resolution has been relegated to the MSM loony-bin, and certainly hasn't become the focus of many other Democrats' urgings. But check out this Newsweek poll on the subject. (Scroll down to the second question in the Newsweek poll): forty-two percent support censure against fifty who oppose it. And that's without meaningful hearings about the wiretapping. Recall, only the author of the wiretaps, Attorney General Gonzales, has ever testified about it--and he said nothing about its breadth or details, simply mouthing its legality. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who's in Bush's pocket, wants to bury the wiretap issue with some soft "advise-the-Congress" legislation; and so the public's right to know now depends on Republican Senator Arlan Specter, who has said he's unpersuaded about the programs' legality and wants to know more. He has the power, through the Senate Judiciary Committee, to call for hearings and a full-scale investigation of the program.

We can only hope that Specter sticks to his guns, because if so the American public will come to understand that this is a vast, ongoing intrusion into our communications, all done without judicial protection, and Feingold's resolution won't look quite so wacky after all. Maybe even some of the hang-back-until-it's-safe-to-jump Democrats (I'm talking about Hillary Clinton and her ilk here) will jump on board, and maybe, just maybe, in the next Congress we'll get the resolution passed. Sometime, somebody's gotta slap the chimp's face. Just once, to see if he can handle it.