Op-Ed Round Up

First, George Will lambastes the administration's NSA spying policy, making the same connection Senator Bulworth made at this very web blog last month:

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

So the Senator isn't alone in wondering how one's "strict constructivism" and judicial "originalism" beliefs are supposed to mesh with the highly ambiguous, extra-constitutional, loosey-goosey, "unitary-executive" theory and the presidential activism inherent in "presidential signing statements".

Meanwhile, on the Shooter front, David Brooks has been reading our blogs, and isn't pleased with our conspiracy-mongering:

So in the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.

Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae. "The 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch is in Kenedy County. So I figure the Armstrongs probably have a lot of pull in county government. So, just a question: how thorough was the investigation of what happened?" the influential blogger Josh Marshall queried darkly. Earlier, he veered off, as he must, into picayune and skin-crawling theorizing about the path the pellets took through Whittington's body:

"Would the weapon and ammunition Dick Cheney shot have the force to imbed pellets near Whittington's heart at 30 yards? ... These pellets would have to have pierced his clothing, his skin and then lodged inside the body cavity, somewhere near or around his heart. The shot came from the right and the heart is on the left so that might add to the amount of tissue needing to be traversed."


Hear that, you liberal web-bloggerers? So the VP shot some guy, didn't allow himself to be interviewed by authorities until some 14-18 hours after the incident. Big deal. Doesn't mean he was too drunk to do so. It just means that the VP, even though he did have something to smooth over the edges before going hunting, didn't want to concern the authorities with the fact that he accidently shot some bb's into his friend, who was really at fault anyway, for getting hisself shot. Probably Shooter didn't want to risk his friend being arrested for not announcing himself properly.

Beyond that, Josh M and Jack Cafferty, Howie sez that Cheney's choice of Hume to "interview" him was a fair and balanced one, since the F network is the number one cable "news" station and of all the networks out there, only the F one gives the Repubs a fair shake. So double double there, you far left bloggerers.