"Don't you know we are at war?"

For four years, President Bush and his team have wielded that question to rebuke critics and to justify their eager expansions of executive authority.

Usually, that approach earns him a sympathetic first hearing from many Americans. So it has been this week as the president performs damage control after he confirmed a New York Times report about secret spying on U.S. citizens. Sources told the Times that Bush performed an end run around Congress, the courts and the Constitution to conduct post-Sept. 11 electronic surveillance of Americans without court warrants.

Some Americans seem willing to accept any incursion into their civil liberties if the president tells them it's needed to catch terrorists.

But over time, more and more citizens will come to realize that the president's refusal to obey the mild, flexible requirements of U.S. law regarding wiretaps for such purposes did not stem from urgency to fight terrorism. It stemmed from an arrogant habit of his White House: the quest to expand executive power secretively and without accountability. This poses risk to civil liberties and the system of checks and balances.

In fact, President Bush at times behaves more like King George III than like George Washington.

Congressional hearings, a potential independent inquiry and the courts must test Bush's claim that this secret surveillance by the National Security Agency "has been effective in disrupting the enemy while safeguarding our personal liberties."

Meantime, here's a related question for the Bush administration: Don't you know we are at war?

While harping on that phrase to expand its powers, the Bush administration in many other areas doesn't act as though the nation were on war footing at all. Civil liberty is the only area where the president seems to think sacrifice is required.

Consider all the areas where it's business as usual, even in matters of clear and present danger, such as chemical plant security. There, an ideological bias against business regulation trumps public safety.

Think about fiscal policy, where repeated tax cuts slanted toward the affluent have made this a war paid for almost entirely with funny money.

Then there's a dysfunctional energy policy that resists higher gas-per-mile standards, pursues illusory gains from Alaska oil and gas drilling and shies from even the most modest hikes in energy taxes. Even as our lust for Middle East oil embroils us with Islamic fanatics, oil conservation is dismissed as so Greatest Generation.

In emergency preparedness, Hurricane Katrina provided a case study in how little sense of urgency and sacrifice the administration had. FEMA's then-director, Michael Brown, seemed more worried about Baton Rouge restaurants filling up before he could get a meal than he was about New Orleans filling up with water.

"Our cities and states are unprepared to handle public-health catastrophes caused by disease, natural disaster or bioterrorism, despite the terrible lessons of 9/11 and the Katrina calamity," wrote former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean in The Philadelphia Inquirer this week.

In grading U.S. government response to the lessons of 9/11, Kean's bipartisan 9/11 commission issued a slew of below-par and failing marks. Panel members did give Bush a "B" in striking a "balance between security and civil liberties," but that was before disclosure of the secret, extra-legal NSA eavesdropping.

Post-9/11 urgency is now the alibi for snooping without a warrant. But where is the urgency elsewhere? On the homefront of this war, big-city police and firefighters still don't have the tools to communicate effectively during an emergency. Air-travel screeners still have no unified list of terror suspects. Homeland security spending is still doled out by the selfish system of the pork barrel, not rational risk analysis. And on and on.

War footing? Hardly. Let's end the double standard. Let those who seek to curb our privacy and liberty in the name of war first show some wartime urgency to do their jobs properly on fiscal policy, emergency preparedness and homeland security.