Another great Greenwald piece, and another small extract (and again, the whole thing is definitely worth reading):

Here is what David Ignatius said two weeks ago when demanding that Congressional Democrats give the administration what it wants and stop questioning Mike McConnell:

People who try to occupy a middle ground in these debates find that it doesn’t exist. That reality confounded Gen. David Petraeus this month. . . . . Now the same meat grinder is devouring Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence. He’s a career military intelligence officer who ran the National Security Agency under President Bill Clinton. As near as I can tell, the only ax he has to grind is catching terrorists. But in the vortex of Washington politics, he has become a partisan figure. An article last week in The Hill newspaper, headlined “Democrats question credibility, consistency of DNI McConnell,” itemized his misstatements and supposed flip-flops as if he were running for office.

Absolutely. Why would anyone dare to suggest that our Director of National Intelligence is anything but pure in his motives and deserving of the blindest of faith in his statements? Just because he got caught manipulating and outright lying to Congress by agreeing with Joe Lieberman that the new FISA law was instrumental in disrupting a German terrorist plot, even though that was a complete fabrication, is hardly any reason to question this Good, Decent, Responsible, Serious Leader. And that is to say nothing of his hysterical and incomparably manipulative shrieking back in August that a Terrorist Attack was about to happen at the Capitol and Congress had better pass the FISA law they want or else blood would be on their hands. And then, more importantly still, there is the fact that McConnell has more extensive private sector connections than virtually anyone in the country to the very telecommunication companies for which he is now demanding amnesty, and he has spent the last decade working on behalf of the very companies who would be the prime beneficiaries of this extraordinary legislative gift. In a healthily functioning political system, McConnell would be disqualified from opining on an amnesty bill for companies to which he is so closely tied.

But to our Beltway opinion-makers, the opposite is true — McConnell is the Unimpeachable Source, and if he decrees that National Security requires Amnesty for his friends and colleagues in the telcom industry, then no decent or serious person will question that. Or else they will have Blood on Their Hands.

UPDATE III: I just learned that the FISA bill cooked up by Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s Senate Intelligence Committee does contain full retroactive amnesty for telecoms. Here is a list of all registered Verizon lobbyists, and here is a partial list of some of the lobbying firms working on behalf of AT&T. AT&T was the fifth largest contributor to Rockefeller’s last campaign, followed by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association in Sixth place, Bell South in Ninth Place, and Verizon was in the top 20.

It’s basically legalized bribery and influence peddling — they pour money into the campaign coffers of these Senators from both parties, pay former government officials such as Jamie Gorelick to help them, and then these Senators jump and pass laws providing that they will receive amnesty for serious felonies. And Joe Klein and David Ignatius are all for it.