If you missed this morning's spur-of-the-moment presidential press conference, you didn't actually lose out. Bush only answered one question straight, about whether or not we could torture people. Excluding that, he continued to obfuscate on the NSA domestic wiretapping issue, a subject that is equally poorly discussed by Richard Posner in TNR.

Posner and Bush seem to make the following argument: if wiretapping makes us all safer, and the President is supposed to make us safer during a war, then the President is right.

But the issue isn't merely, "what would make us safer"? Because under that logic, the President could incarcerate all Muslims, or close the borders down indefinitely, or dissolve Congress in the interests of "national security". The President has specific powers laid out to him in the Constitution; when he exceeds those powers he is breaking the law. It's a simple as that.

The other side of the equation, of course, is that Posner and Bush are implicitly saying that if we don't spy on Americans, that Al Qaeda will kill Americans. For all the talk about terrorists "hating us for our freedom", Bush seemed to fold awfully fast when he was worried about evil terrorists.

And the simple fact remains: there have been exactly zero terrorist attacks on America in the four years post September eleventh. And exactly zero for the four years prior to September eleventh, when there were no unauthorized domestic wiretaps. That really illuminates the lie: when Bush, or anyone else, can explain why the FISA process couldn't be used, I'll be impressed.