Typical.

So the White House is calling Al Gore a hypocrite in response to Gore's blistering speech yesterday, in which Gore said that Dubya has broken the law engaging in warrantless domestic spying. He also accused Hillary Clinton - who said that the Bush administration was "one of the worst" in U.S. history - as playing politics.

Scott McClellan, always with that damn shifty-eyed, constipated, I-hate-my-job look he has, said that:

[T]he Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

"I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds," McClellan said of Gore.

That's it? That's the White House official retort? "They did it too"?

However, the Aldrich Ames case isn't even the same instance:

[A]t the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

Even if FISA did cover physical searches, "they did it too" is a weak ass argument.