"If our enemies know what we're doing, why can't we?"

The buzz about the New York Times revealing the Bush administration's spying on financial transactions reached entirely new levels of preposterousness in the week since the story was published.

Glenn Greenwald discloses the many conservatives who have gone beyond being offended to summoning Nazi-style thuggery against the people who wrote and published the story. His post reveals details that are simply appalling to everyone who values democracy. If someone gets injured as a result of these lunatics inciting violence, God help them.

But the reaction from the MSM has been more than pushback; they are hitting back -- hard.

Richard Orr, a blast from my personal past, is responsible for the headline above. He continues:

Correct me, but in all the stories I've seen and read on the Times' "exposure" that the government has been dogging al-Qaida's financial network, I have yet to see one concrete example of who or what is being harmed by it.

What's more, the 9-11 commission has publicly said such surveillance is necessary to choke off the money that feeds their terrorist operations.

So if al-Qaida wasn't aware their financial transactions are being tracked, we have nothing to fear from them. They're too stupid to worry about.

What we do have to fear are the mindless calls for prosecuting the news media for informing us of what the most secretive administration in memory is doing in the apparent belief they're running a private corporation instead of a democratic republic that requires an informed electorate.

They're the same cries that went up with publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon era - the exposure of which led to the revelation that Nixon operatives had broken into a psychiatrist's office to find damaging personal information on Daniel Elsberg, the man who exposed what the administration was up to in Vietnam and elsewhere.

In Watergate, Nixon argued that the Pentagon Papers and the tapes from the Oval Office, if made public, would compromise national security when, in fact, it was national embarrassment and the fear of prosecution that really concerned them.

If our enemies know what we're doing, why can't we?

And this morning on Meet the Press, Dana Priest crushed Bill Bennett like a peanut -- with the Moral Gambler sitting right next to her. If you want to see it, McBlogger has it.

Update (7/3): Greenwald follows up. The right-wingers have disgraced temselves once again -- not that this atrocious display will stem their bile.