Dereliction of dutyDems who support Hayden

Reading the news of the vote by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to move to the Senate floor the nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to the post of director of central intelligence (DCI), your ordinarily serene blogstress is beside herself with emotion that veers from despair to fury. Vous et moi have been abandoned, mes amis, by the majority of Democrats on the intelligence committee who decided to support Hayden. They are: Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Barbara Mikulski (Md.), Carl Levin (Mich.) and Jay Rockefeller (W.V.).

Hayden, you'll recall, is the architect of the Bush administration's domestic spying program -- the one of which he assured the nation was only directed at suspected terrorists who make calls to people overseas. That turned out to be a lie, of course, proven by the big USA Today story that reported the extent of telecom companies' involvement in the scheme, which was revealed to involve the government's snooping on the telephone traffic of virtually every American on whose phone records it could set its prying eyes.

Your cybertrix does offer gratitude to Democratic Senators Evan Bayh (Ind.), Russell Feingold (Wis.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.), who had the gumption to vote "nay" on the Hayden nomination. She remains quite perplexed, however, by the votes of the others -- especially Levin and Rockefeller, who had both eloquently raised concerns when the domestic espionage, conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) at the behest of President Bush, was revealed by The New York Times last December.