OK, OK. See if there are reasonable grounds for the subpoena, then do it. Let's put on the foil and see way. 'Cause when the going gets tough, the tough get foily.

The Dems need to surrender the idea -- almost impossible for them, because they believe in "good government" and can't get their minds around the fact that the Republicans don't -- that certain government agencies just can't be politicized. If the criminal justice system has been turned into a tool to effect election outcomes, as any fool can see that it has, from the Wisconsin story breaking today, why not the NSA?

Because "they wouldn't do that?"

I think it's quite likely that within the NSA's larger, and massive surveillance program to model social networks between email addresses (as a proxy for people), there is a smaller and more focused program to monitor individuals. Others agree.

As I wrote about this time of year back in 2006:

Why does Bush want [the warrantless surveillance program] so badly? Thomas Powers asks the same question in nicer words at the New York Review of Books:

The questions hardest to answer will be what the NSA actually did, and whether it served any useful purpose. A recent New York Times story contradicts the President’s claim that the NSA program was “limited…to known al-Qaeda members or affiliates.” Citing anonymous FBI officials, the Times claimed that the NSA flooded the bureau with “thousands” of names per month to check out for possible terrorist connections. Far from being a “vital tool,” as described by President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing will-o’-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And far from saving “thousands of lives,” as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.

Well. What could this small, sharply focused program be?

Obviously, Ratfucking.

As the non-Beltway and reasonably trustworthy McClatchy wrote, back in July 2006:

[Via McClatchy]:

In a policy reversal, President Bush has agreed to sign legislation allowing a secret federal court to assess the constitutionality of his warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, a senior Republican senator announced Thursday.

By having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court conduct the review instead of a regular federal court, the Bush administration would ensure the secrecy of details of the highly classified program. The administration has argued that making details of the program public would compromise national security.

However, such details could include politically explosive disclosures that the government has kept tabs on people it shouldn’t have been monitoring.

Well, well. Does that sound like Ratfucking to you?

Now, let's just do a little imagineering here on what the ratfucking would look like--besides being not a pretty sight. It would be irresponsible not to speculate, because, even from what we know now, the Republicans have defined deviance in government so far down that we haven't hit bottom yet.

I can brainstorm three ways the Bush administration would use the NSA for ratfucking, all plausible in the light of what we know about past behavior: (1) target opponents, (2) target propagation of leaks and planted stories, and (3) target the Democrats. The NSA has the technical power to do this, and probably some Regent Law School grad in Cheney's bunker has evolved a crackpot theory to say why its Constitutional:"time-a-war-commander-in-chief yadda yadda yadda." The theory, of course, is classfied.

So--speculating even more freely--that's what the White House would do. Now, trying to think like a criminal again (or like Hoover, who kept files on everybody) what would the NSA do?

If I were the NSA, I'd turn that same technology against (4) the White House itself -- cream off the best email from Rove and the whole gang as a form of protection.

So, that's my picture of the treasure at the NSA and he nature of the Beltway. Basically, we need to picture all these guys ratfucking each other as hard as they can, and go from there.

In summary: In my narrative, the NSA, in an act of bureaucratic self-protection, would turn Bush's program for ratfucking his opponents into a program for ratfucking him. Wouldn't you?

The ratfucking never ends, does it?

NOTE Of course, the NSA will never admit that they're ratfucking Bush. Heck, Hoover never did. The word slowly leaked out. But that the NSA has a small, tightly focused program to help Bush ratfuck political opponents? Yeah, I'd say that's subpoena material.