Hasn't anybody else noticed...

...that had George Bush not skirted the law with his various domestic spying programs, had George Bush actually gotten the appropriate court approval and warrants necessary in order to conduct such unprecedented spying on Americans, none of these recent "revelations" would have been as newsworthy?

What made last week's New York Times story so newsworthy was the fact that, yet again, the Bush administration was caught spying on Americans without following the normal court procedures expected in a democracy. Procedures that separate America from common dictators.

That's news. And news of George Bush's own making.

Had the story simply been that the Bush administration was doing x, y, and z to fight the war on terror, but that Bush had followed the law and gone to the courts to make sure our rights were being protected, he'd have a much stronger argument, I think, against newspapers that simply wanted to publish details of our spy programs "just for the fun of it."

But in all the recent cases, it seems that the Bush administration has skirted the law, or at least skirted the courts, and in many instances they seem to have also lied about it. If George Bush would start playing by the rules, maybe he'd have fewer stories about how he breaks the rules.

The New York Times deserves a medal for its reporting, as does USA Today and everyone else who has had the nerve to challenge this increasingly dangerous and incompetent man we have sitting in the White House.