We are still waiting to learn if Porter Goss's resignation was all about hookers or if he had "other problems." Naturally, I am hoping it's the hookers.

There is no such mystery or intrigue to the White House's coming appointment of Air Force General Michael Hayden to Goss's position. Hayden, "a visible and aggressive defender of the administration's controversial eavesdropping program," is intended to provoke Democrats into attacking Bush's illegal wiretapping program. It's an issue on which the White House believes it has the advantage--because having Democrats lecture on legality and constitutionality plays into the image of Bush as cowboy, Bush as Jack Bauer from 24. "Illegal" is an abstraction, but catching terrorists is a concrete, desirable thing, and so what if the government intercepts a few phone calls, they're doing it to catch terrorists, and after all I have nothing to hide... As Ross Douthat has pointed out, the legal argument

add[s] to the existing perception of the GOP as the party that sometimes goes too far and skirts the law in the pursuit of national security objectives. And it's almost always better to be tagged as "the party that might go too far" than as "the party that won't go far enough" - which is how the Democrats are perceived these days.