UPDATE: Sorry that I don’t just update my earlier post, but this is easier.

Gad, now I’m angrier still, if that’s possible, thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy’s dissection of the legal issues involved (make that, not involved) in the classified program the New York Times illegally exposed.

McCarthy makes the very clear case that nothing in this program reflected any kin dof extrajudicial or remotely questionable behavior on the part of the Bush Administration. Extra steps were taken to bend over backwards to ensure legality and oversight. So what have we learned, what news, from the Times’ willful violation of national security, aiding and abetting leakers, who have committed a felony offense in releasing classified information? (Can we yank their clearances and throw them in jail, please?)

McCarthy says the only thing we learned was that, yet again, the Bush Administration was able to gather highly valuable intelligence in confronting the terrorist threat:

No, the most salient thing we learn from today’s compromise of the TFTP is that the program has been highly effective at keeping us safe. According to the government, it has helped identify and locate terrorists and their financial backers; it has been instrumental in charting terrorist networks; and it has been essential in starving these savage organizations of their lifeblood: funding.

Not so effective from here on out, I should think. Matters of public record, Bill Keller, are you flippin’ insane? I’m one of those John Q. Public types, Keller, and I’ll tell you this: It is supremely in my interest that my Government and Military be afforded every reasonable opportunity and means, allowed by law and the Constitution, to fight these brutal enemies anywhere and everywhere.

Without you destroying those means, jeopardizing operations, revealing classified information to the enemy, or placing partisan objectives above national security. Try for once to prove yourselves worthy of the liberties and freedoms you make so much noise saying you defend, rather than demonstrating so clearly to the rest of us what bloomin’ a$$hats you are.

McCarthy laments on why you folks don’t get it:

Appealing to the patriotism of these newspapers proved about as promising as appealing to the humanity of the terrorists they so insouciantly edify — the same monsters who, as we saw again only a few days ago with the torture murder of two American soldiers, continue to define depravity down.
The newspapers, of course, said no. Why? What could outweigh the need to protect a valid effort to shield Americans from additional, barbarous attacks? Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, smugly decreed that the Bush administration’s “access to this vast repository of international financial data” was, in his singularly impeccable judgment, “a matter of public interest.”
And you probably thought George Bush was the imperious one. And that the public’s principal interest was in remaining alive. Wrong again.
The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

It’s time to fight this war against the war. We need to shun, ostracize, and exact a high civil, commercial, political and moral price for this new kind of enemy. Those so driven by hatred and partisan agenda, that they’re “not just against the war, but on the other side.” (I can’t remember who used to say that, anybody remind me, and I’ll attribute.)