Do You Want a Thief Bugging Your Phone?

It is great that the discussion in this country has turned to censuring the president. After the Democratic landslide in November, we can advance this talk to that of impeachment. But one thing that is never talked about in all the back and forth about whether the president should have the power to ignore laws and the Constitution and order the wiretapping of citizens without any court supervision is a PRACTICAL discussion of how this will (and no doubt does) actually work. The republicans will defend the idea of letting the president ignore the rule of law "because he's fighting the terrorists". But that argument is so specious. Even if you are so blind as to think that Bush would only decide to wiretap actual terrorists, it is not the president who actually makes these decisions. He's just setting the policy. THE ACTUAL DECISIONS AS TO WHO TO WIRETAP IS MADE BY ADMINISTRATORS. Does anyone have any doubt that if the administration is given such unfettered power that someone like Cheney, or Karl Rove (or will be delegated to someone like a lower level White House aide in charge of religious pandering who just happens to be a major shoplifter) won't decide to order wiretapping of anyone who is "not supporting the troops" by actually expressing their opinion that maybe everything Bush does isn't 100% perfect. You only need go back 33 years to the last totally corrupt republican administration which did just that when their botched break-in of the Democratic offices at the Watergate complex revealed their lower tech version of electronic eavesdropping.