Luddites of "liberalism"

Dan Froomkin has rushed into the fray with one of the sillier columns I’ve seen in mainstream media recently, especially in the normally more balanced WaPo, regarding Bush and the NSA situation. He accuses the President of employing “Bait and Switch” tactics by listing failed terror attacks in a speech to the National Guard today.

Under pressure to justify his warrantless domestic spying program, President Bush today with much fanfare disclosed new details about the thwarting of a terrorist hijacking plot four years ago. But what it had to do with eavesdropping, Bush didn’t say.

Well, of course, he didn’t say precisely, because that would be revealing intelligence methods in public, something that would be essentially moronic (but that doesn’t stop Froomkin for criticizing him for not doing it.) What we are reading in this column is a classic case of projection, because the real “bait and switch” going on is by Froomkin and his co-religionists (I say this because he is engaging in a form of fundamentalist thought). Like born-again Luddites who never used a cell phone or a wireless Internet connection, they attack Bush for not getting warrants for wiretaps without bothering to answer the most obvious question: How could these warrants be obtained speedily enough to act to prevent terror attacks in a high tech world? This is the essence of the problem, but it is completely ignored.

Later in his column, Froomkin criticizes Bush for revealing secret intellligence information, after he began his column by, in essence, criticizing him for not revealing enough. What tendentious crap!