At the Mahablog, Barbara says:

As an exasperated Jack Cafferty asked on CNN yesterday, “Why don’t you go find Osama bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?”

My answer is that the Bush Administration is all about grand gestures and magic bullets, not about doing the practical, basic, unglamorous, hard-slogging things that actually need doing.

I think that's absolutely right. However, I'd add that that isn't the only explanation for the administration's obsession with extralegal domestic surveillance.

Remember the history of the Right and the Republican Party after World War II: Nixon versus "the Pink Lady," Joe McCarthy, None Dare Call It Treason, and on through the days of Nixon's enemies list and Watergate.

That's the soil that nurtured the most important members of the current White House crew. Note the fixation on "the enemy within."

Recall George W. Bush's loathing of the campus left when he was a Yale undergrad. Note that he and his family seem never to have gotten over a slur on the elder Bush's good name reportedly uttered by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin to W. when the latter was at Yale.

Nothing's changed. In Bushworld, the real enemy is right next door.

****

This is convenient, of course, because, as Barbara says, Bush wants to succeed not through patience and hard work, but by hitting a "big gusher" and achieving instant success. Go read what she has to say.)