Goring Al

Time for a true confession -- back in 1988, I thought Al Gore was the best Democratic candidate for President, and one whom I could conceiveably support for President.

Hey, I was 14. We all do stupid things when we're young and foolish.

Of course, Al somehow lost the 2000 Presidential election, grew a beard and lost his marbles. Apparently, whatever he had was catching -- soon after he endorsed Howard Dean, Dean lost his shot at the Presidency (on the plus side, we don't think Dean has ever grown a beard, and we're pretty sure he waved bye-bye to his marbles long before Gore showed up). But Al's spent most of his last five years making Ted Kennedy look like a political moderate.

Today, Gore (now with a disturbing resemblence to actor Jeffrey Jones) decided to go after President Bush for authorizing the NSA electonic surveillance program...

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

I'd tear him apart, but Gateway Pundit does the job for me. As he notes, the Clinton Adminstration (Gore's former place of employment) thought warrantless searches were just peachy keen. I'd say more, but this may be the best summary of the entire issue...

Vanderbilt Law School Dropout Albert A. Gore Jr., accused President Bush of breaking the law when, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the president authorized wiretapping on international phone calls of terrorist suspects.

Before making another wild accusation against the man who defeated him in the 2000 presidential election, Gore should perhaps have consulted individuals who, unlike him, actually graduated from law school and studied the laws in question. Over at Powerline, one such attorney, John Hinderaker, analyzed the president’s program and surveyed the applicable law and found “under the Constitution and all controlling precedents, the NSA intercept program is legal.” In his update to that post, he provides a link to the Justice Department rationale upon which President Bush relied. (Unlike Mr. Gore, those who wrote that opinion graduated from law school.)

And it’s not just a conservative attorney like Mr. Hinderaker who has found the president’s program to be legal. As we have reported before, John Schmidt, associate attorney general in the Clinton Administration, in which Mr. Gore also served (but in a different capacity) found that the president had the legal authority to OK the wiretaps. Another left-of-center attorney to sign off on the president’s plan was Cass Sunstein, one of the nation’s most respected constitutional scholars.

(hat tip: Instapundit) As I have noted, there are legitimate questions about the NSA program that need to be discussed. Unfortunately, most Democrats only seem capable of raising this issue in a hypocritical attempt to garner political gain. Perhaps they should learn a lesson and not follow Gore off the cliff this time.