posted May 18, 2006 12:56 PM            

Some work in the government, and some hold elected office. The U.S. Senate seems particularly infested these days, as the senators' most recent product – an immigration "reform" bill – one that would accomplish its "reform" by making America essentially a Mexican province by the year 2025, will attest.

That date, incidentally, is only 19 years from today. So that grandchild your daughter brought home today will turn 19 in a nation that none of us will recognize.

During the Cold War, it was easy to recognize traitors. They were, for the most part, spies or those in a position of government trust who went over to the other side. Their motivation was often painted as financial, but the small sums that changed hands indicate that other forces were at work. Sometimes it was blackmail in a shady area of their personal life; oftentimes it was ideological.

Today's traitors are different. Proud of their treason, they operate out in the open. They call their treason by many different names. Government "servants" (would that any of us should live to see that day again) claim their treason is principled opposition to government policies. The hate-America-first contingent in the mainlining media prefers to spin their treason as the public's right to know – as if the public had a right to know Eisenhower's D-Day invasion plans beforehand so those who didn't agree with the war could share them with the Nazis before American soldiers climbed into the landing craft and hit the beaches at Normandy.

At its heart, an act of treason against America is an act of raw, naked aggression directed personally against you, me and every citizen of this country. The traitor's act is designed to destroy the values and institutions that we rely upon to live our lives as Americans – because the traitor doesn't agree with them. Traitors choose not to do the hard, constitutional legwork of changing our democratic institutions. Instead, they choose to undermine them, weaken them and hope that an enemy – whether domestic or foreign, they really don't care – will bring down the America they loathe and erect something more to their liking. In this, they exhibit an infantile streak in both their thinking and character.

When elected to a position of power, they abuse that power in favor of their nebulous agenda of weakening America – culturally, economically, or militarily – and somehow in the process of their treason making the world more "fair" for other nations. This always results in praise from the world's petty dictators, who pour America's aid into their personal bank accounts, while using their forum at the United Nations to berate us for not doing more for the poor. The praise of such vile individuals seems particularly important to the privileged, guilt-laden white liberals in America's government.

Our national understanding of what treason is – and therefore the outrage that would normally accompany an outbreak of such magnitude – seems to have vanished in recent years. It may be that there are many more people who consider themselves "world citizens" and therefore above the national fray. Odd, though, such "world citizens" seldom choose to live their lives in Uganda, Dufar, Haiti or other such parts of the world. They prefer the developed West – the one that provides them with open financial markets, open elections, police and military protection, and access to the latest health-care innovations. This is also the West that they choose to betray.

There is no guarantee that the West, and America in particular, will survive this outbreak of treason. The great majority of America's self-loathing, guilt-besieged, white, leftist "elites" would gladly trade America's place in the world for a day's praise by traitors at the Times, the Post, or perhaps a trip to Ted Turner's buffalo ranch, where they could be wined, dined and buffaloed into believing how self-effacing and forward thinking they are for betraying millions of ordinary, hard-working Americans.

posted May 18, 2006 01:41 PM            

The profound polarization of American politics in recent years has produced a good many striking phenomena, but few of them as striking, or as damaging, as the disclosure of various government efforts to discover and forestall future terrorist attacks on this country.

The formula is simple. A reporter for one of the many liberal newspapers or TV outlets hostile to the administration develops a similarly minded contact in one of the agencies charged with protecting the country against such attacks. The contact (whom the reporter guarantees against disclosure of his or her identity) tells the reporter about some technique the government is using to try to identify al-Qaida agents planning mischief. The technique often involves detecting communications between such agents, and therefore must pass the test of not infringing impermissibly on normal communications between innocent American citizens.

The administration knows this, and takes great care to make sure that its surveillance techniques pass that test. Thus, before it taps a communication between any two people in the United States, it applies for a warrant from a special court set up by Congress to pass on such requests. In the case of communications between a person in the United States and a suspected al-Qaida agent abroad, however, the attorney general has ruled that such a warrant is not required under the law Congress passed. And the government has similarly obtained, and assembled into a vast database, records of the calls made from one telephone number to another in this country – the same information that is listed in your monthly phone bill, and which the Supreme Court has already ruled is not confidential. (It should be stressed that the calls themselves are not tapped. The government seeks only to know if one phone number is calling another a suspiciously large number of times, or on occasions that appear related to terrorist activities.)

As a final precaution, all such techniques are disclosed, in secret briefings by the executive branch, to the leaders of both parties in both Houses of Congress, and to the chairmen and ranking opposition members of the intelligence committees of both the House and the Senate.

The editor whose reporter has learned of such a secret operation thereupon splashes it across the front page of his paper, or on his TV network's evening news hour. He will, of course, take care to interview one or more Democratic members of Congress who weren't in on the secret briefings, and they can be depended upon to shriek that every American's privacy is being invaded unconstitutionally by this dastardly administration. (Congressman Harold Ford of Tennessee charged the other day that the government is "eavesdropping" on innocent citizens – the falsest imaginable accusation.) As for the Democrats who were briefed, they tend to hint that they weren't told "everything," or just prudently keep their mouths shut.

But that's not even the most delicious result of the scam. Dana Priest, a Washington Post reporter, has already received a Pulitzer prize for her report, obtained from a leaker, on the CIA's supposedly "secret" prisons in eastern Europe for top-level al-Qaida detainees. One wonders if Osama bin Laden has some similar sort of Medal of Honor for American reporters, not to mention CIA agents, who expose our counter-terrorist operations, to his benefit.

The leakers, in any case, have the satisfaction of seeing their vindictive hatred of the Bush administration (whatever its origin – being passed over for promotion, perhaps?) take the form of political damage it can ill afford.

To be sure, one alleged leaker was caught recently. Mary O. McCarthy, a CIA officer who had contributed the maximum allowed by law to the Kerry campaign in 2004, flunked a lie-detector test and confessed, according to the CIA, that she "knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence." Later, after consulting a lawyer, she revised her story and denied she had done anything wrong. (One of her media contacts, by the way, was reportedly Dana Priest.)