The news you're not getting

is that Bush's approval numbers have been trending upward since he began to speak back to the accusations against him. Mickey Kaus speculates that another domestic spying scandal and he'll hit 60%.

Of course, the warrantless wiretaps of phone numbers found on Al Qaeda computers is not the same, in the minds of most Americans, as, say, the Watergate Burglary, or political dirty tricks. To call this domestic spying is at best a distortion, a "foolish consistency" which alarms civil libertarians who would burn down the building to keep a piece or two of furniture from being taken.

Liberties are not necessarily rights. Certainly, privacy, or that extreme conception of it that has become the enemy of normative values, has a lesser claim, being found only in the penumbrae and emanations of the Constitution, than the right to life mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. We've already sacrificed more than 3,000 lives to the denial in which the left has immersed itself. I don't believe that people who know they could be next are inclined to go back to the 1990's when such things were treated as mere crimes rather than acts of war.

We'll be told endlessly that Bush's moves to protect us are impeachable offenses, but keep your eyes on the "out of the mainstream" blogs, talk radio hosts and cable news networks to get a balanced account.

If you just want the liberal slant. anything will do. But remember the words of Justice Jackson, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." After 9/11, that statement seems pretty obvious, which is why it has been so roundly criticized by liberals, who also keep claiming that the Patriot Act will open our library records to be scanned routinely for interest in forbidden topics, as if the courts would be so dull that they couldn't distinguish such abuses from legitimate applications.