There seems to be a huge backlash against Obama’s vote on the FISA bill. Although I don’t understand the legal implications behind the vote, I read an opinion article that is pretty interesting.
But the anti-intellectualism of his opponents — people who think George W. Bush’s C-average is a good thing — makes it politically dangerous to explain complex issues in complex ways. And the conventions of political reporting in this country — which emphasize the horse race instead of the substance of campaigns — make it almost impossible to get this level of detail across to the public.
I wonder if the people criticizing the vote would feel differently had they gone through three years of law school and studied up on warrant law. Besides the knee-gut reaction to the bill, I have yet to see some good legal arguments. My problem is that even if I read a good dissection of the argument, I don’t think I’d understand it.
