Pity poor Nancy Pelosi. She, like the rest of her Democratic colleagues, has huge problems when it comes to criticizing the NSA intercept program in order to make political hay. On the one hand, they can’t be seen as soft on national security so you never hear them calling for the program to be terminated. On the other hand, they have to pander to their cockeyed base of support so you never hear them saying that the program was necessary.

It’s almost enough to make a Republican giggle.

Legal and unnecessary? Sounds like a great argument to make if you’re not running for anything. Unfortunately for Pelosi, she and her Democratic camp followers have to face the voters and are desperately flailing about looking for an issue that will prove a magic talisman that if rubbed hard enough, will bring them victory at the polls next November.

Judging by this interview with the Associated Press, Pelosi is coming to the realization that the NSA intercept program ain’t it:

Pelosi did not say the NSA’s surveillance program was illegal. But she said the administration should follow the procedures in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows government lawyers to ask a secretive court for warrants for surveillance in the United States during national security investigations.

“If you say … this is for a narrow universe of calls, there is absolutely no issue with getting a FISA warrant for that,” said Pelosi, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and has been involved for the past 13 years in overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies.

“It is when you go beyond that, that it becomes a challenge,” she said in the interview Friday. “The president says he is not going beyond that, so why can’t he obey the law?”

Pelosi declined to offer specifics about warrants granted, but she said the administration already has “the mother of all FISAs which enables them to do a lot.”

If Pelosi is going to hang her hat on the technical requirements of getting a warrant through FISA, she will probably be disabused of this line of attack by Attorney General Gonzalez who will appear at hearings called by Senator Specter’s Judiciary Committee starting on February 6. Without being able to get into the details of how the program worked, Gonzalez will still be able to cite plenty of case law that shows the President not only had the authority under the Constitution to act but that bypassing the FISA court was both legal and justifiable under the circumstances.

Responding to a New York Times hit piece on the President’s legal justifications for the NSA intercept program, John Hindraker summarizes Pelosi’s dilemma:

The Times quotes liberal critics of the administration repeatedly through the article, so why is it suddenly so coy on this critical point? Because there is no law professor in America—actually, no law student in America—who would allow his name to be associated with the Times’ indefensible characterization of the 2002 opinion of the FISA appellate court. The Times tries to suggest that that court’s statement that the President has the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes lends only debatable support to the administration’s case because “some legal analysts say” that the court was only talking about precedents that pre-dated the passage of FISA in 1978; therefore, the court’s conclusion may not be operative post-FISA. That suggestion is completely untenable. The FISA appellate court specifically rejected the theory argued for by the Times:

We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

No doubt the Democrats on the Committee will ignore this kind of evidence and, like Pelosi, raise the specter of dragons hiding in the mist to intimate dark and foreboding evil doings being perpetrated by the White House.

Unfortunately for the Dems, Saint George only has to slay real dragons – and the people agree with him judging by this NY Times-CBS Poll:

In one striking finding, respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at “Americans that the government is suspicious of;” they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at “ordinary Americans.”

I would say it’s a pretty safe bet that if you’re in contact with someone overseas who has sympathy for or works with terrorists, that would make the government suspicious of you.

Pelosi and her pals can read these polls as well as you or I which makes her statements on the issue begin to sound more and more like the protestations of a survivor of the Titanic who complains that there is no first class service available in the lifeboats.

At the same time that they realize they can’t call for the suspension or elimination of a program that the majority of Americans see as an effective tool in keeping the homeland safe, neither can they come out in support of it due to the rabid opposition by the feral dogs inhabiting the fever swamps of the party to anything that proves effective in the War on Terror done by the President.

So we’re left with the spectacle of Pelosi gingerly walking the plank hoping that her crazed brethren don’t push her over the edge by demanding that she and her colleagues call for the elimination of the intercept program.

This is why this issue will fade with the coming of the blooming cherry blossoms in DC. It is unlikely that the court challenges against the program will make any headway for the foreseeable future and as a political issue, “that dog won’t hunt” as Zell Miller might say.

Don’t feel too bad for Nancy and her trapped friends. There’s always hope that the Republicans in Congress will find a way to hand them the key to their handcuffs and send them on their merry way to victory in November.

Can the Republicans be that stupid? Stay tuned.