My new best friend Glenn Greenwald has been liveblogging the Senate debate today regarding the extension of the Protect America Act (PAA), a piece of legislation passed last year that made temporary alterations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The temporary alterations expire Feb. 2. As Greenwald has pointed out, the president has been playing fast and loose with his alleged desire for national security ever since the bill came up for debate. Bush insists that immunity for telecom companies that complied with the administration's request for wiretapping is essential to our national security. In fact, the president cares about national security so much that he's willing to play games with it in order to get what he wants.

Wait, what?

Last August, when the original PAA was passed, Bush spun it as necessary for us to maintain our security; without it, we would be powerless to access terrorists' emails here in the 21st century. Telecom immunity is icing on the cake. Now, if the Senate doesn't vote in favor of making the PAA permanent and enacting telecom immunity, Bush will spin Democrats as the party that wants the terrorists to win. But it's not the Democrats who are using fear to their advantage. Bush has said that he will veto any bill that contains telecom immunity. If Democrats refuse to allow such a provision, and they allow the PAA to expire, Bush will be able to say that they're playing with national security for political reasons. If Democrats pass a 30-day extension to the PAA, though, Bush has said he will veto that, as well:

The administration explicitly admits that the President won't allow an extension because he wants to repeat the success of last August -- when Congressional Democrats capitulated to every Bush demand because they were told they had to act within a matter of days, i.e., before their recess, lest they cause us all to be killed by The Terrorists. "They need the heat of the current law lapsing to get this done," said a senior administration official, courteously granted anonymity by The Politico's Allen to issue these threats.

This veto threat is one of the President's most brazen acts ever, so nakedly exposing the fun and games he routinely plays with National Security Threats. After sending Mike McConnell out last August to warn that we will all die without the PAA, Bush now says that he would rather let it expire than give Congress another 30 days. He just comes right out and announces, then, that he will leave us all vulnerable to a Terrorist Attack unless he not only gets everything he wants from Congress -- all his new warrantless eavesdropping powers made permanent plus full immunity for his lawbreaking telecom partners -- but also gets it exactly when he wants it (i.e., now -- not 30 days from now).

How strange that the PAA is necessary right now so that we can go after terrorists, unless the bill includes a provision that the president doesn't like, in which case, the terrorists will apparently ... what? Wait thirty days before communicating with each other about their dastardly plans? Every American should be outraged at what's going on, here.

What is going on? Your president, while mouthing platitudes about needing the PAA for national security, is more than willing to let the allegedly necessary provisions of PAA expire so that he doesn't have to make a compromise at all. This leads us to two conclusions: one, the president doesn't care about national security; or two, the PAA's provisions aren't actually necessary for national security. If the former is true, then the president arrives at the border of pure evil, as he is willing to place American lives in danger for political expediency. If the latter is true, then PAA's provisions are for something other than national security, and what this other thing is, we don't know. In this latter case, the president is not pure evil, but is instead a schemer, claiming that he needs PAA's provisions, when in fact he doesn't. There's also the issue of telecom immunity. Telecom immunity doesn't immediately protect us from terrorists. What it does do is protect the promises Bush and friends may have made to AT&T, Verizon, et al. in exchange for their cooperation in engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance.

So far, it looks like the Senate has -- narrowly -- defeated a cloture vote. A cloture vote is a vote to cut off debate about a particular piece of legislation. Republicans wanted to invoke cloture and force a vote on the PAA extension; Democrats would have none of it, preferring to either stave the vote off until they got rid of the amendments they didn't like or keep filibustering until Feb. 2, when the PAA expires.

Hopefully they will be able to stave any vote off until Feb. 2, at which time PAA will expire, forcing the president to comply with FISA as he should have always done.