From Woody Allen’s Crimes & Misdemeanors. The question was, “What is comedy?”:
Lester (Alan Alda): “What makes New York such a funny place is that there’s so much tension and pain and misery and craziness here. And that’s the first part of comedy. But you’ve got to get some distance from it. The thing to remember about comedy is that if it bends its funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny… so you’ve got to get back from the pain… Comedy is tragedy plus time.”
Today, we are witnessing the culmination of a long sad process. Ever since 9/11, the administration has been bending the constitution. On February 6th, 2006, Congress is breaking the constitution. And even though the NSA hearings are a farce, they are not funny.
The first glaring indication that Specter’s hearings are going to be farcical was the refusal of the Republicans to place the head of the Justice Department, the official with the most responsibility to uphold our laws, under oath. Nothing could be more symbolic. The Attorney General is not expected to tell the truth, in fact Alberto Gonzales cannot tell the truth in these hearings. Knowing this, and by prior arrangement, the Republicans were kind enough to not expose limit the head of our Justice Department’s criminal exposure for his lies.
How could things improve after such an inauspicious beginning? Believe me, things will not improve.
What do we know about the NSA program? We know that somewhere around eleven employees of the NSA were so concerned about the legality of the program that the risked their jobs and broke the secrecy ethos of their agency to report it to reporters from the New York Times. We know that, as a result of the NSA program, the FBI was swamped with bogus leads that led them to investigate many, many innocent American citizens with no connection to terrorism.
Those two facts completely explode the legal and rhetorical defense of the Republicans. The program was not limited to people with known connections to Al-Qaeda, or affiliates of Al-Qaeda. At least, the FBI doesn’t think so, and they are hopping mad about all the manhours they wasted harassing innocent people.
The oversight of the program is supposed to done by qualified intelligence officers within the NSA, and to be limited to their discretion. Yet, nearly a dozen NSA officers thought the program was so egregious that they exposed the program to the press.
There is no way that NSA officers would have leaked a program that was limited to surveilling al-Qaeda communications. There is also no way that any FISA judge would reject a request for such surveillance.
Under these circumstances, it is clear that the President is lying, that Gonzales is lying, and that any even perfunctory investigation would expose these lies in short order.
The Republicans in Congress have decided that they have two choices. They can impeach their own President in an election year, or they can cede their own prerogatives and powers to the Executive branch. They have chosen the latter. And in order to cede these powers, they have to hold hearings that obscure the true nature of the NSA program, and that reveal no information contrary to the patently absurd characterization and legal justification of what the NSA program did.
This moment of crisis has been building for a long time. But today the tension reached its breaking point, and the separation of powers laid out in the Constitution broke.
