Michelle Malkin On PRISM and the History of, and Differences Between, Bush and Obama

From Michelle Malkin:

It is certainly schadenfreudelicious to see Al Gore and assorted Democratic tools going bonkers over news of President Obama’s radically expanded phone call data collection program — which he, ahem, inherited from the Bush administration and has apparently now widened far beyond anything Bush ever enacted or proposed. 

But unlike Gore and company, I am not going to engage in a full, NSA-bashing freakout. Some of us have not regressed completely to a 9/10 mentality. 

I will instead provide you with a sober reflection on why I supported the Bush NSA’s work and why Obama’s NSA program raises far more troubling questions about domestic spying than his predecessor. 

As longtime readers know, I supported the NSA’s post-9/11 efforts to collect and connect the jihad dots during the Bush years. When left-wing civil liberties absolutists were ready to hang Bush intel officials, I exposed the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t hypocrisy of Bush-bashers who condemned the administration for not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 jihadi attacks and then condemned it for doing too much. Bush defended himself ably at a press conference in December 2005 — refresh your memories here.
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...Here is another key difference between the Bush and Obama administration programs.
Bush was fully engaged and committed to the war on terror when the NSA programs were first exposed in 2005, four short years after the bloody 9/11 attacks. 

Obama, by contrast, immediately rejected the war on terror for “workplace violence”/”overseas contingency operations” euphemisms and officially declared last week that America’s war on terror is over. 

Which makes you wonder: 

What exactly prompted the Obama FBI to seek the sweeping FISA order on April 25? And why does it extend through July 19? 

If it was related to the April 15 Boston terror bombing, how could Obama then stand up at National Defense University on May 23 and so publicly throw in the towel on combating Islamic jihad? 

And if the catalyst for the FISA court order wasn’t the Boston bombing, then why so sweeping and so secretive? If not for the Guardian-published leak, which I must note I find as troubling now as I did during the Bush years, the document would not have been declassified until April 12, 2038. 

Another fundamental difference between then and now: While Bush-bashers raised the specter of political spying abuses when the post-9/11 NSA program was exposed, there was never a shred of evidence that such abuses ever took place....

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.