I'm glad the NSA is using its sophisticated assets to monitor conversations between suspected terrorists in the United States and their handlers abroad. Imagine if the NSA had been listening to Mohammed Atta as he plotted to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. What if we had been able to sneak into Atta's apartment before the attack and discovered that he had airplane manuals and flight schedules alongside jihadist training tapes? Indeed, we don't even have to engage in fantasy about what we might have uncovered that could have prevented 9/11. FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley documented her fellow FBI agents' frustration when they were unable to get a search warrant in August 2001 to examine the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the man who would have been the 20th hijacker had he not been taken into custody a month before the attack. The whole plot might have fallen apart had the FBI been able to gain access to the information on Moussaoui's hard drive.

 Democrats have lost all sense of proportion. It's hard to know if they are acting out of a misguided desire to protect civil liberties, which aren't truly being threatened in the first place, or simply playing politics.  I'd like to think it's the former, but their actions over the last week point to partisanship as the likely cause. Where were these Democrat putative civil libertarians when the Clinton administration claimed the authority to engage in warrantless searches in the mid-1990s? As Byron York reported on National Review Online this week, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 1994 that "The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes, and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General." The issue came up after federal authorities searched the home of CIA spy Aldrich Ames without first obtaining a warrant. I don't remember any Democrat stepping forward to allege the Clinton administration had violated Ames' civil liberties.

 It used to be that in a time of war, partisans put aside their differences and supported the commander in chief. Now it seems some Democrats would rather declare war on the president than ensure we win the real war being waged by our actual enemies.