GET OUT THE DECODER RING, IT'S ANOTHER LIBERAL COLUMNIST:

You've got mail but not privacy (Tom Teepen, 1/11/07, Cox Newspapers)

It turns out that as the holiday season was nearing its annual peak of panic and few were paying much attention to anything else, President Bush declared, in effect, that he is welcome to open your mail if he wants to. (Well, not him personally. The president is a busy man. He would have his agents to it.)

If not a full-blown flap, then at least a flaplet has been stirred by the New York Daily News' discovery that Bush, as is his habit, first signed new legislation and then declared it null and void, sort of. The device was the "presidential signing statement," a traditional option that in the past was used rarely and mainly just to clarify a statute's technical ambiguities. [...]

In the instant matter, Bush signed a law declaring that the government must get warrants to open first-class mail. But he attached a signing statement saying his administration would take the provision as meaning "in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

Translated, that means be circumspect in your love letters.

The president's spokesman, Tony Snow, shrugs the matter off. Bush, he says, was only reaffirming an authority sanctioned by longstanding law letting the U.S. Postal Service open first-class mail if there is good reason to suspect it contains a bomb or other material posing an immediate threat to public safety.

That would indeed be fine. But, then, why this therefore-redundant codicil? And why is the administration resisting efforts to determine the extent and in what way it may be recording envelope information from presumably unopened first-class mail?

Let's see if we can follow this: Tony Snow notes it's a reaffirmation, Mr. Teepen says if that's the case then everything is fine, and then asks why the president is repeating himself if it's just a reaffirmation? He then wonders why the president isn't game for arguing about definitional matters.