It’s nice to be right. Last week, alert reader philosophicus (“The Network Archictecture of Treason”) called bullshit in Bush for, among other things, going into full parse mode to obfuscate his warrantless surveillance program (“monitor” versus “detect”), and for spinning the program as wiretapping (“voice”) as opposed to data mining, as in data mining all your email (ibid; “Everything including Aunt Molly”).

Now the rest of the world is catching up. We’ll have more unasked questions below, but for now, let’s savor Bob Barr, of all people, on Bush’s parsing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitition:

President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to “monitor” phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to “detect” improper communications.

This example of presidential phrase parsing was followed quickly by the president’s press secretary, Scott McLellan, dead-panning to reporters that when Bush said a couple of years ago that he would never allow the NSA to monitor Americans without a court order, what he really meant was something different than what he actually said. If McLellan’s last name had been McCurry, and the topic an illicit relationship with a White House intern rather than illegal spying on American citizens, I could have easily been listening to a White House news conference at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal.

Everybody, please—Ask the God of Your Choice to have someone give Bush a blowjob so we can impeach him!

Then, David Ignatius, of all people, weighs in with a WaPo Op-Ed on how it all turned out to be data mining after all:

We know only the barest outlines of what the NSA has been doing. The most reliable accounts have appeared in the New York Times, the newspaper that broke the story. Although the headline has been “warrantless wiretapping,” the Times accounts suggest the program actually was something closer to a data-mining system that collected and analyzed vast amounts of digitized data in an effort to find patterns that might identify potential terrorists.

Yes, it’s nice to be right, and if the rest of the SCLM and one or two (gasp) honest Republicans take a week to catch up, then The God of Your Choice bless ’em, say I.

But don’t you get the feeling we’re still waiting for the other jackboot to drop on this one? Here are questions I’d like to ask:

1. The FISA court became less of a rubberstamp after 2001 and started altering and even rejecting Bush’s requests. (That was why Bush decided to ignore them). Which requests were rejected and why?

2. Was there ever a single case where the Bush administration could not surveill a target because of the 72 -hour retroactive requirement to get a warrant?

3. What do the Republicans mean by “foreign” when he talks about email? If one packet of the email goes through a foreign ISP, does that make it foreign?

4. How many people have actually had email surveilled? If the correpondents of person A are all surveilled, and then all their corresondents, and then all their correspondents, that’s a geometrical progression that could lead to hundreds of thousands of individuals having all their mail read.

6. Is the email that has been data mined permanently stored?

7. Has the administration privatized any aspects of its data mining program?

8. Has the administration privatized the storage of the data mined email?

9. Can citizens “opt out” from having their email data mined by the government? If not, why not?

And of course the biggest question of all: Was the Bush surveillance program ever used for ratfucking domestic surveillance of political opponents? (Is that why the White House wouldn’t release John Bolton’s intercepts?) You just know these guys wouldn’t be able to help themselves; they always overreach, and they always overreach in the same ways….

NOTE I’ll have the second part of philosophicus’s series up later today; I’m working for the corporate moloch again, so time is not as free as it was over Christmas.