Everyone's Mad at the Gray Lady

Gotta feel sorry for the New York Times -- they've pissed everyone off by announcing that they held off writing about Bush's secret warrantless eavesdropping program for a year at the White House's request.

Conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin think they should have held off indefinitely. Malkin also suggests that the Times editors made the decision to publish the story now because they were angry about the success of the elections in Iraq:

The paper's reporters righteously pat themselves on the back for waiting a year. But why is the Times' decision to publish the story any less dangerous now? Why did the editors choose to run the piece on the day after the Iraqi elections? Why not the day before? Why not Sunday?

What ingratitude. Here the Paper of Record agrees not to publish a huge, and very important, story about the president of the United States having broken federal law to allow the government to spy on Americans without court orders. And they do keep that information to themselves for an entire year. Some would say that decision was a shocking breach of the newspaper's obligation to the public. Some would say that only in a totalitarian dictatorship does the nation's most prestigious newspaper conspire with the government to deny the people the information they need, and have a right, to know.

Not Michelle, though. Give that girl an inch, she wants 10,000 miles.

On the other hand, Shakespeare's Sister is wondering where is the risk to national security in telling the American public what the terrorists already know.

I admit, I'm no criminal mastermind, but I fail to see how the public being made aware that the government is evading official oversight of its spying would alert terrorists that they may be spied on. Don't most people up to no good try to hide their schemes, specifically because they assume (and rightfully so) that the government has a pretty easy time securing warrants for eavesdropping under FISA? The government's assertions are absurd, and hardly justification for the Times' decision to withhold this damning information from the public. The Times is blowing as much smoke up our asses as the dirtbag Bushies who ran the scam in the first place.

Exactly. Really, does anyone seriously think that would-be terrorists do not know the U.S. government monitors international electronic communications and phone calls? Are we to believe that Al Qaeda just got the shock of their lives, to learn that the Bush administration reads e-mail and taps phones?

The only people who didn't know what's going on are the American people. Perhaps those are the people who scare Bush the most.