This latest Wall Street Journal bombshell about the National Security Agency's having spied on the back-channel shenanigans between putative ally Benjamin Netanyahu and the members of Congress regarding the state of the Iran nuclear talks has a little WTF somethin'-somethin' for everyone. If you happen to be a staunch American Likudnik, you can ask WTF the NSA is doing spying on our plucky ally. If, like me, you don't trust the NSA's assurances as far as you can throw the billions of dollars we spend snooping around the world, you can ask WTF the NSA is doing spying on members of Congress. (Answer to outraged conservatives in this camp: exactly what all you people want it to do to Muslims.) If you have made a career out of being a public nut, you can go indiscriminately crazy. And if, like me, you've always wondered WTF members of Congress were doing helping a putative ally derail a major foreign-policy initiative of the United States, thanks to the NSA, you've now got a pretty good idea.

A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the intercepts said Israel's pitch to undecided lawmakers often included such questions as: "How can we get your vote? What's it going to take?" NSA intelligence reports helped the White House figure out which Israeli government officials had leaked information from confidential U.S. briefings. When confronted by the U.S., Israel denied passing on the briefing materials. The agency's goal was "to give us an accurate illustrative picture of what [the Israelis] were doing," a senior U.S. official said.

So, while there is a little somethin'-somethin' there for everybody, it is such a mess at this point that it has laid yet another series of rakes in the path of people like Marco Rubio, who is on the record as supporting the old NSA criminality exposed by Edward Snowden.

Whap.

"I actually think it might be worse than what some people might think, but this is an issue that we'll keep a close eye on," said Rubio, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an interview on Fox News's "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday. Rubio was discussing a Wall Street Journal article that said the U.S. continues to spy on the communications of allied nations' leaders, capturing communications between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides during the Iran nuclear talks. The report also said that the surveillance swept up communications involving lawmakers. The Republican presidential contender raised concerns about the government monitoring Israel. "They have a right to be concerned about the fact that while some leaders around the world are no longer being targeted, one of our strongest allies in the Middle East, Israel, is," he said… This is "one of those complicated issues when it comes to intelligence matters," he cautioned. "We have to be very careful about how we discuss it, especially since there's a press report that I don't think gets the entire story," Rubio said.

(By the way, the "other leaders" who "are no longer being targeted" and who so concern Rubio include those notable international renegades Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel.)

Surveillance of the kind exposed by Snowden is a guaranteed passage to the dark side of politics. No matter what their professed ideology on every other issue, nobody is truly immune from its temptations. (Glenn Greenwald is completely correct on this point.) The authoritarian sweet-tooth is the congenital flaw in every democracy, no matter how old. And "Oh, now my ox is the one being gored!" is the worst of all possible responses.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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