The black helicopter crowd was paranoid about the wrong president

George W. Bush's dictatorial ambitions are no secret to anyone. The man has no reverence for the Constitution or for the role of the President in a system built on checks and balances. As far as he's concerned, he's the American Jesus, and that's that.

Bush saw the opportunity to indulge his own lust for absolute power through intimidation very early on after the September 11 attacks. Warrants? George W. Bush don't need no es-teenking warrants:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

Swell. We have a narcissist/sociopath/paranoid president who thinks he has absolute power to spy on any American he wants to and absolute power to imprison anyone he wants to for as long as he wants to, without charges and without access to an attorney.

Now someone tell me how this is consistent with American ideals.

But here's the kicker, which ought to end the "New York Times is a liberal paper out to smear Our God's Anointed Preznit" meme forever:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Shorter New York Times: We take our marching orders from the Bush Administration.