Treasonable Doubt

The nutsery on the right has gone ballistic over the New York Times story about the administration's financial data-mining, including one radio host advocating bringing the paper up on charges of treason.

First, the New York Times wasn't the only paper to run with the story; the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal also had it. (Oddly enough, I don't hear anyone clamouring for the WSJ to be brought up on charges; perhaps since it is editorially a toady for the White House, what's sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the pander...)

Second, it wouldn't seem so hypocritical for the wingnuts to get all bent out of shape if they held the view that all leaking is bad, not just the stuff that makes it look like the administration is both incompetent in their intelligence searching and blatantly intolerant of the rights of privacy. Where was the outrage over the leaks that were engineered to embarrass the administration's opponents? Isn't outing a CIA operative and jeopardizing her life, the lives of her contacts, and possibly blowing up operations in places where we need them just for political revenge worthy of a right-wing rant?

What kind of magic spell does the Bush administration cast over its followers who by nature are suspicious of government intrusion into anything? Would they be so frothy at the Times if it was disclosed that the FBI was trolling through the records of gun registrations? I don't see a whole lot of righties getting worked up about the hits this administration has taken against the Bill of Rights, but then many of them have treated them as if they were situational; the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are great when they agree with their motives and their agenda, but when they apply to people or things they don't like -- habeus corpus, flag-burning, queers -- well, not so fast.

The Nixon administration accused the Times and the Washington Post of treason over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and went so far as to take them to court. I'll say this much for Nixon; he had the nerve and the drive to do it. I'm willing to bet that all this treason talk will die down in the next week or so and that once again we'll be left with just another bunch of bloviation by an administration that has the attention span of a sugared-up six-year-old.

Update: Glenn Greenwald brilliantly sums it all up for you.