Dictators are Bad - Whether Named Hussein, Il-Sung, or Dumbya

Oops, typo on Dubya. My bad (bite me).

From CBS News, and I'd agree with most of it:

The President of the United States has enormous powers. During wartime, he has even greater powers, as he should. But he doesn't have "unlimited powers." Countries in which the rulers have unlimited powers are known as dictatorships, and those are the kinds of governments that we are supposedly against. So, when I heard the president use as an excuse for eavesdropping on U.S. citizens the fact that he just felt it was necessary, it didn't seem like a good enough reason. We already have a system in which there is a special court set up to issue secret warrants for this purpose. These warrants can be granted quickly, and are rarely turned down. If time is of the essence, the president can even get these warrants after the fact. The only thing is, if you get a warrant, there will be a record of whom you have eavesdropped on.

This warrant system came about after the Vietnam War when it was discovered that the federal government had been spying on people whose positions on the war were different from the administration's, and on people the government just didn't like. One of the presidents involved in these tapings was Richard Nixon, and he had an infamous "enemies list," and he felt he had a right to spy on whomever he wanted. As I recall, Nixon got into a lot of trouble...

A few days after it was revealed that the government was secretly spying on U.S. citizens without warrants, President Bush used words like "unexcusable" and "shameful." I was happily surprised that he took this position, but when I read closer, I saw that he was saying that what was "unexcusable" and "shameful" was the media's telling the American people that this spying was going on.

The problem with all this secret taping is that once it gets started, it can get out of control. Since all of this is so secretive, how are we — or Congress — to know who's listening in on what conversations?