Democrats get it wrong again

The blogosphere is full of excellent, in depth posts that take to task the Democrats and the New York Times (really two different arms of the same monster) over their apparent outrage on the Bush administration spying on terrorists in the United States without a court order. I hope soon to compile a list of sources that describe in better words than would come from me just how silly (and dangerous) the democrats are acting. In the meantime, though, Opinion Journal* has a great discussion of the political peril the Democrats risk as they continue their hysterics over Bush's decision to spy on terrorists. Here's one point I hadn't really considered before:

It's worth pondering just what it is that the Democrats are arguing here. They claim not that President Bush isn't doing enough to keep America safe from terrorism, but that he's doing too much. The implication is that the threat of terrorism within America is not all that serious and never was--that 9/11, horrific though it was, was a one-off.

There is, at the very least, a tension between this blasé approach and the oft-heard Democratic claim that liberating Iraq increased the threat of terrorism. If that threat still isn't serious enough to justify the merest attenuation of "civil liberties," then this argument against Iraq, even if true, is trivial.

*(I couldn't find a link to the Opinion Journal entry the above quote is from. It was a December 28 post entitled "Complacency Threatens Civil Liberties."