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.