Addendum: For all those liberal reactionaries mired in their OOPS mindset, and screaming “Bush” can do this or that and spy on anyone, a word of reality. Bush doesn’t select the targets of NSA monitoring – he doesn’t determine who is an overseas terrorist. The selection of who to monitor overseas is done through intelligence efforts and following leads passed on to us or discovdered.

And Bush doesn’t dictate who in the US the terrorist communicates with – which is the only way a US citizen can be ‘overheard’ by the NSA without a FIS Court warrant. How could he? Bush cannot force the NSA to monitor a US citizen. It can’t happen. Anyone who thinks so has a cartoon-TV level understanding of government.

For a US citizen to become a target of the NSA, where all your communications are monitored, requires a FIS Court warrant. No one in the NSA or FBI would set up a surveillance on someone in the US – or US Citizen – without one. No matter what a President may order.

OOPS is a mind altering illness that warps reality into a paranoid and irrational fear of things not actually there (read below to learn more about OOPS). It is why the left is so emotional, and so very, very wrong. I have now read 3-4 posts on how Bush magically can now order someone to be monitored in the US without a warrant. It must suck being so ignorant of how the US government works. – end update

I typically call the Democrats the “Surrendercrats” because no matter how much opportunity we have to succeed in Iraq they are dead set we lose Iraq at any cost. They are obsessed with the hope America will lose, so Bush will lose, so they will win back power. But they also have a terrible, basic personality flaw that has been forcing them to make blunder after blunder on other National Security here at home. They obsess constantly about spying on Americans, and the abuse of power and risk to the Fourth Amendment. But it is all paranoid conspiracy fantasies that, in essence, are wild fears about a band of Nixons out there with nothing better to do with their life than listen in on the ranting of the lunatic left.

Trust me, only a few far rightwing nuts are so obsessed as to frame their entire existence around listening in on the far left rant about their paranoid fears. But that has not stopped the far left from being more afraid of possible spying on their personal peccadilloes than the real threat of terrorists trying to kill large numbers of Americans. The left seems to be saying, “We would rather let Americans die than let Uncle Sam Spy on us!” I say, first prove someone would even consider listening to lunatics discuss their paranoid fantasies before asking Americans to die to stop it from happening.

This incredible strange and obsessive fear that Uncle Sam is watching them has made the Liberals (and their Dem sock puppets) take some really dumb positions, especially when it comes to the NSA and FISA. I have finally realized that it is not so much Bush Derangement Syndromes (BDS) that drives the left on this matter (though that helps), but it is more their Obstinate, Obsessive Paranoia Syndrome (OOPS). Their big OOPS! Why else would Dems trap themselves in the corner of either voting to give terrorist communications unlimited sanctuary when dialing their buddies in the US, or the other option of just not monitoring terrorists at all! Only a massive case of OOPS could get them into that kind of a bind.

The Dems’ mistakes on NSA begin with the fact that their OOPS drives them to think they are right on an issue, when actually they are just wrong and have been since the original reporting misled them and the country on what the issue was. As much of the country realized how bad the NY Times represented the FISA flap the Liberals let their OOPS drive them to the point where they decided, instead of bad and misleading reporting, this was actually an issue of privacy! That’s it! It couldn’t have been the NY Times was wrong when it claimed the NSA bypassed FISA (we learned the opposite was true), it had to be a conspiracy to spy on us! And the OOPS became solidified in their minds. So off they went on their OOPS driven madness.

The OOPS was so bad they blinded themselves to what had happened to our national security with the publication of the secret policies that coordinate the activities of the NSA and FIS Court. The Dems trumpeted nonsense about 72 hour emergency wire tap windows without realizing they just telegraphed to the terrorists how to stay ahead of the wiretapping – just switch lines of communications every 48 hours and your good. The court would frown on constant use of 72 hour emergency wire taps (how could you discern the chasing of a terrorist from chasing a red herring?), and shut that down. That is a great example of the depth of the OOPS of the liberals.

Since 2005, when the misleading story broke, the OOPS has grown ever more ingrained into much of the Democrat leadership, which is very liberal and very paranoid. But much of the Democrat party is not joining in to the OOPS mindset. So we today find those not prone to a big OOPS on national security doing the right thing:

Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday with the Bush administration that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for any role they played in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Congressional official said Wednesday.

Senators this week began reviewing classified documents related to the participation of the telephone carriers in the security agency program and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had “acted in good faith” in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program and that they should not be punished through civil litigation for their roles, the official said.

(More here). Well, when not blinded by the mirage of OOPS, the facts of the matter are clear and responsible people act on them. Now compare that to what was going on in the House of Representatives this week, which is all OOPS. Powerline noted a key point in an article I discussed yesterday and where I focused on the relationship of the current debate to the case of kidnapped US soldiers in Iraq and the FISA delays caused by recent FIS Court rulings paralyzing the search effort for these soldiers. (More here on that matter). The point made by Powerline is even more important:

The defects in the Democrats’ legislation are obvious. As the Washington Times notes, it “would require a court order to gather communications when a foreign terrorist tries to contact someone in the United States” even though “from 1978 when FISA was first enacted until this year, no such requirement existed.”

This is such a big case of OOPS it is stunning. Things were bad enough prior to 9-11 when the NSA would delete who and where the US contact was when terrorist elements in Yemen DID communicate with the 9-11 hostages. It was bad enough we lost the lead, but we did note the contact and supposedly the content. But now (as someone said somewhere on this today but I lost the reference) the Dems want us to hang up when the terrorists overseas phone someone in the US.

As I said, that is a huge OOPS. When known terrorists overseas contact someone in the US the Dems want us to stop listening until we get the FIS Court’s permission to save US lives. Got that? You must prove to a court you really will be saving American lives before you can act to do so. What kind of OOPS drive people to think that even makes sense?

It was not hard for the GOP to take advantage of the Dems big OOPS and force them to make a vote on reality:

House Democrats, confounded by a Republican procedural maneuver that would force an embarrassing vote on terrorism, yesterday called off a vote on an electronic-surveillance bill that the White House opposes.

Republicans would have forced Democrats either to vote to effectively kill the bill that restricts federal wiretap power or to vote against authorizing the government to spy on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups.

OK, I guess you can call it a “procedural maneuver” to require a vote on the reality of the matter – me I call it common sense. The House Dems have pulled their OOPS driven Bill and now look like total fools since the Senate will pass one without the OOPS in it.

This matter is really simple and America gets the point. We are either focused on stopping the terrorist threat, RESPONSIBLY using the tools we have to save Americans from suffering another 9-11, or we just focus on the OOPS and take our eyes off the threats to America. This is one time where we cannot do two things at once because the dems’ OOPS, by its nature, blinds our efforts to monitor and stop terrorist attacks before they happen. We can always figure it out AFTER thousands of Americans are dead. But what we have been doing since 9-11 is removing the liberal OOPS from policies that were rooted in the paranoid Nixon years and cleanse them of all that OOPS crap so we could preemptively protect this country. The House Dems are really asking us all to forget the terrorists and go beyond the OOPS that existed prior to 9-11 and blinded us to that attack. They want us to accept and support their OOPS. Or we just ignore all those people who have become OOPS infected when it comes to national security. I vote the latter.