The House Democrats, having played a dumb and useless game of chicken they clearly planned to lose anyway when they let our national security protections lapse in fit of pique, have finally succumbed and worked out some silly plan to get the FISA fixes back in place by next week:

House and Senate Democratic leaders are headed into talks today that they say could lead to a breakthrough on legislation to revamp domestic surveillance powers and grant phone companies some form of immunity for their role in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A senior House Democratic aide said a bill could be sent to President Bush as early as next week.

…

A group of several dozen moderate to conservative House Democrats, known as “Blue Dogs,” has pushed Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to approve the Senate bill. Some aides on Capitol Hill were discussing the potential for the House passing the Senate version but breaking it into two votes: one on the portion of the bill that deals with revising FISA provisions and a second on the immunity measure.

This procedural move would allow many Democrats to vote against immunity but still make its approval all but certain, since almost every Republican and some centrist Democrats would vote in favor.

There is no excuse for this to take this long. And to give some petty members some sort of escape hatch where they can say “yes – we need it today”, but “no – it was wrong before and we should let telecoms get sued” is ridiculous. The incoherence of the left is on grand display if this is the juvenile rationalizations required for some members to get over the Bush Derangement Syndrome and have votes which would let this pass anyway!.

The fact is there are some deluded people out there who think letting us listen in on terrorists overseas, and pass leads on to the FBI when those overseas enemies contact people here in America (which is the ONLY change to FISA since 9-11, allowing NSA leads to be pursued and come before the FIS Court for probable cause in full up surveillance petitions). These strange folks keep thinking we will have the second coming of Nixon if we do such outrageous things such as monitor our enemies and track down leads of terrorists cells here in the US.

My favorite case in point for the delusional and panicked arm of the left wing is Glenn Greenwald, who is all upset the world is coming to an end:

No rational person who has watched Congressional Democrats since they took over Congress could possibly have expected them to do anything but what they always do: namely, whatever they’re told to do by the White House. The last thing they were ever going to do was stand their ground over Americans’ basic liberties and the rule of law, concepts about which they couldn’t possibly care less.

Greenwald hysterical outbursts are a great lesson on obsession and how it poisons rationale thought. No one is going to say listening to Bin Laden is illegal, nor listening to anyone who has contact with him (that’s how surveillance works, lots of ‘contacts’ get caught up in monitoring the ‘target’). And no one is going to say it is wrong to pass to the FBI any suspicious contacts with Bin Laden and people here in the US – who cannot be put under surveillance until the FIS Court agrees.

And here is where Greenwald loses everyone – we have lived under this system since 9-11 and Nixon is still in his grave and no one has had the civil liberties violated. And until Glenn and others come up with hard evidence of malfeasance to offset the hard evidence of terrorist threats they are simply ranting and raving about dreams, fantasies or nightmares. Imagined problems don’t stack up against real ones.

The fixes that corrected the situation prior to 9-11, when the NSA detected the high jackers in the US but could not pass the leads to the FBI, will be put back in place and the world will not fall apart. No matter how much the leftist pretend it will.