Another week, another prodigious scandal followed by another muted chorus of short-lived outrage, and finally, another notch in the belt of Constitution killers.

The latest predictable outrage (please nudge me should I doze off while scribbling this) was the revelation that on top of violating eavesdropping laws the administration has, in further violation of the law, been trolling for a record of every domestic phone call. It is, of course, all quite illegal -- "If they don't get a court order, it's a crime," bluntly said the director of the Center for National Security Studies -- and would have guaranteed impeachment proceedings against any sexually promiscuous president without other sin.

A president sitting on a mountain of past high crimes and misdemeanors gets a constitutional pass, however, because -- or so it is argued -- tolerating criminality really does get easier when that criminality is framed in just the right circumstantial question.

The public nods approvingly when asked if it supports the government taking every possible precaution against another terrorist attack. Who wouldn’t? On the other hand, who would if the question included: “outside of constitutional boundaries and in direct violation of statutory law”?

The former is what was asked in the context of the latest criminal outrage, and not surprisingly, 63 percent responded, “You bet.”

Given that level of public imprimatur, the government can then defend the indefensible without even worrying about how silly the defense sounds. Consider this:

One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of "known bad guys."

Here’s a presumably deduction-minded superspook saying that the NSA indeed knows who the bad guys are, and it’s well aware of the bad guys’ “regular contacts,” yet these two factors fail to stamp the data collection of your calls to Aunt Molly as anything but untouchable.

That defense wouldn’t pass the laugh test at a junior-high debate meet, yet there it is, the government’s laughable but seemingly acceptable story in the absence of widespread outrage demanding accountability.

But maybe outraged commentators are wrong in speculating that public outrage is understated largely, or only, because of faulty polling. Maybe outrage is missing mostly because the public doesn’t really care. Maybe the improper construction of polling questions is as irrelevant to the problem as the NSA’s illegal tactics are to tracking terrorists.

Civil liberties never have polled well and, when asked, most Americans don’t know the Bill of Rights from a bill of fare. Maybe for all their proud talk and forgotten civics lessons Americans simply don’t value liberty that much and will willingly trade freedom for police-state security on even the flimsiest of rationales.

Maybe this lambs-to-the-slaughter mentality of submission is just an atavistic, desperate Hobbesian reflex impossible to suppress in our short and brutish existences.

Try polling that.