I’m enthralled to hear this, but on the same token it’s sort of like hearing that my dog is going to stop biting people or that the guy down the street will stop groping children. What I mean is, it’s great that Bush’s wiretaps are going to be approved by FISA first and get a court order, but that should have been the case initially.

Also, notice the near monumental flip-flop combined with a bizarre contradiction:

The turnaround came after more than a year of stubborn insistence by the White House that oversight by the secret court was not required by law and, in fact, would be a hindrance to stopping terrorists. The FISA court was established in the late 1970s to review requests for warrants to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

Bush has maintained that the warrantless surveillance program’s existence was “fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities,” and has said he would continue to reauthorize it “for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups.” He has said circumventing the FISA court “enables us to move faster and quicker.”

That Bush’s image of the “steadfast, unwavering, steely-eyed leader” has been a hologram at best isn’t anything new, but this is an incredibly high profile addition to the list, far beyond the fare of steel tariffs or whether or not Condoleeza Rice could testify. The wiretapping program has been a huge front in the Faux-War on Terror debate, and here Bush is relenting and yielding to the critics.

Only he’s not really. He’s still holding up the image that he wasn’t breaking the law at all, which confuses me more than a little bit. No, it’s not illegal, but we’ll do what the people who charged it was said we should do. Awkward.

I’m not sure if you guys were aware of this, but apparently there’s a war going on in Afghanistan. I figured we had won that back in 2003 and it was going swimmingly these days. It seems I was wrong, and not only that, but they need more troops pronto.

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry pointed to a doubling in the last month in the number of cross-border incidents along a stretch of border opposite a Pakistani tribal area where the Islamabad government struck a peace agreement with tribal leaders last September.

He predicted more violence to come after meeting here with Gates, who flew into Afghanistan late Monday to review the situation in meetings with military chiefs and President Hamid Karzai.

Wait wait wait. So the inarguable front line in the Faux-War on Terror, the country that harbored Al Qaeda, the place we went to war with over four years ago, is getting MORE dangerous, and they need more troops. We’re pouring an additional 21,500 troops into Iraq, but… how many are in Afghanistan?

Eikenberry said US force levels in Afghanistan were now at an all-time high of 23,000 to 24,000 troops and he did not expect that to be reduced next year or in 2008.

…right. Well, they’re talking about “incidents” there, but what are those incidents REALLY? It can’t be anything major.

The number of direct fire attacks soared from 1,558 in 2005 to 4,542 in 2006; improvised explosive device attacks were up from 783 to 1,677 in the same period; and the number of suicide attacks rose from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006.

Oh. All right, so that means attacks in Afghanistan have gone up anywhere between two and tenfold, and the total number of forces there is just barely bigger than the “surge” in Iraq. This is how the fight against terrorism is being managed. We haven’t even won the LITTLE one yet. Imagine how long the big one will last. And one more for the road.

Eikenberry said one reason the Taliban has been able to mount its biggest offensive since their ouster in December 2001 is that they have been able to establish a command structure inside both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Amazing. Just amazing. Okay, so if you’re keeping track out there (ballparking now)…

Yeah, that sounds about right. Your government in action, folks.