Why the NSA Wiretaps issue is a loser for the left.

Mort Kondracke is the most worthy journalist of the title "centrist" I know of. His quote from Michael Chertoff, a former Appeals Court justice and head of the Department of Homeland Security, brings the whole debate over the NSA wiretaps into its propert focus:

I think it's important to point out," . . . Chertoff told me in an interview, "that there's no evidence that this is a program designed to achieve political ends or do something nefarious."

That's the nub of the issue and what makes it the Un-watergate, contrary to the reflex of the Democrats and the MSM to equate this use of the President's national security powers with Nixon's abuse of them for political ends.

He was talking about the National Security Agency's warrantless "domestic spying" program, and I couldn't agree with him more. Despite the alarms sounded by the American Civil Liberties Union, former Vice President Al Gore and various Members of Congress, "there hasn't even been a hint" that the program is targeted at domestic dissidents or innocent bystanders, Chertoff said. It's designed to find and stop terrorists.

"If you go back to the post-Sept. 11 analyses and the 9/11 commission, the whole message was that we were inadequately sensitive to the need to identify the dots and connect them," he said.

"Now, what we're trying to do is gather as many dots as we can, figure out which are the ones that have to be connected and we're getting them connected," he said.

While refusing to discuss how the highly classified program works, Chertoff made it pretty clear that it involves "data mining" -collecting vast amounts of international communications data, running it through computers to spot key words and honing in on potential terrorists.

A former prosecutor, federal judge and head of the Justice Department's criminal division, he convincingly defended the program's legal basis and intelligence value.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, CNN gives Howard Dean a whole segment to repeat the charge that Bush broke the law. Talk about overplaying your hand.