It’s not wrong to worry about NSA

Published 9:11 pm Sunday, August 11, 2013

The ongoing dispute between Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is for the most part a family squabble. As presumable posturing for the 2016 Republican presidential primary, the dispute is fairly mild and a little tedious.

But there is one aspect that bears closer examination. Christie, for all his fine qualities, makes a strategic error in dismissing all concerns about NSA’s domestic spying activities. The public is worried about government snooping, and reasonably so.

Here’s what Christie said: “These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.”

He strikes a solid populist tone — the debates are “esoteric,” meaning “for the select few.” The rest of us, he implies, aren’t worried about the NSA.

But we are. A June Gallup poll shows this. According to that group, “More Americans disapprove (53 percent) than approve (37 percent) of the federal government agency program that as part of its efforts to investigate terrorism obtained records from U.S. telephone and Internet companies to ‘compile telephone call logs and Internet communications.’”

That matches another poll, conducted by CBS, which found that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the domestic data collection.

But it’s the last half of what Christie said that’s really disturbing: “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.”

For one thing, that’s a fallacious appeal to emotion.

Does Christie truly believe that conservatives who are concerned about government overreach don’t care about the victims of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001?

“If you don’t see it his way you don’t know what 9/11 was — you weren’t there, you don’t know how people suffered,” Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal. “If you don’t see it his way you don’t care about the feelings of the widows and orphans. It seems to me telling that he either doesn’t have a logical argument or doesn’t think he has to make it.”

Such a statement is beneath the governor.

“His comments on surveillance were an appeal only to emotion, not to logic and argument and fact, but emotion,” Noonan adds. “This is increasingly the way politics is done in America now. It’s how they do politics at the White House, where the president usually doesn’t bother to make a case and instead just tries to set a mood. But it’s not how Christie normally approaches public questions. In speeches and appearances in the past he’s addressed the logic of the issue at hand, whether it’s spending or the implications of pension promises, or union contracts, or tax rates. That’s part of why he’s been so popular — he’s blunt and logical, has an argument to make and makes it clearly.”

The brouhaha will soon die down, and probably be forgotten. Christie will return to form as a logical warrior.

In the meantime, let’s not forget that the NSA is watching, and we should all be concerned about that.