Okay - someone has to do it - and I haven't seen it elsewhere - even from the eloquent and incisive Mr. Greenwald - so here goes.
The reasons why the FISA capitulation is an enormity are legion - it betrays the Constitution, it establilshes a precedent for rampant lawlessness, it empowers a known serial liar based on a series of falsehoods, it shows that your trusted representative can easily be bought and it makes a mockery of the notion of "standing up" to Bush.
But, there is another reason - the FISA capitulation makes us weaker, less safe and more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The reason is expanded below.
Please to explain - the fundamental requrement of obtaining a warrant instills discipline and provides incentives for efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed this is a transcendent principle of the Constitution - fidelity to the strictures placed on government requires government to be more disciplined in their efforts -
(this principle of accountability instilling discipline applies beyond just governmental acitivity - but as it is not directly material to the FISA debate let us leave it aside for now)>
Currently - to begin intrusive, extra Constitutional invasion of privacy - the Intelligence Community (IC) must go through the exercise of articulating a rationale for their efforts. Imagine for a moment what that entails - you are an IC eavesdropper - on your desk you have dozens of leads - where to go? If you have to articulate - with the idea of appearing before a judge - the reasons why you believe this violation of the Constitution is justified - then you will streamline and make more efficient your search - and you are the person best equipped to make that determenation. The idea of removing the requirement for a warrant is to remove the requirement of articulating that rationale. Yet, if history teaches anything, it teaches that the less disciplined become more incompetent, the less we demand of our government before it takes from us, the less it performs. To put it another way - accountability has a linear and positive relationship with competence.
How can anyone, with a straight face, argue against the proposition that the one thing Bush and modern Republicanism stands for is the promotion of incompetence. The unifying principle of Bushism is that holding people to account for wrongdoing is too high a price to pay - that the transaction costs involved in enforcing the discipline of competence is "frivolous."
If there is one thing that makes me bats about the so called "progressive" commmunity is that we/they/you won't stand up and say - look these Republicans are losers, they are imperiling us and our children and it is because they stand for the proposition that incompetence is a virtue, negligence to be extolled, sloth rewarded. The are soft on terror - becasue they are just plain too lazy to do things right.