An Easy Call: Lying

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.

Oh, and at least now the Senate will have a few questions to ask Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the man George W. Bush just named to head the CIA, at his confirmation hearings.

While Hayden was running the super-secret National Security Agency, according to a report yesterday in USA Today, the NSA began collecting comprehensive records of telephone calls made by "tens of millions of Americans." If your service is provided by AT&T, Verizon or BellSouth, according to the newspaper, this means your phone calls -- all the calls you've made since late 2001. Of the major phone companies, only Qwest reportedly declined to cooperate."

<snip>

"Step back for a moment. There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient. They've tried to radically change our concept of privacy. We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that now we know that the administration -- I'll say "apparently," although if the report were untrue I think the president would have denied it -- is keeping track of the phone calls of millions of citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism. Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are ."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051101877.html

[CAG]

1. This is the part thats so good:

"There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient."

But the editorial misses one very important point that we all seem to be missing as well in all your bellyaching about "constitution this and constitution that": ITS NOT LIKE THERE WAS A FREAKIN' BL#% J&B IN THE WHITE HOUSE, PEOPLE! CALM DOWN AND LET THE MAN DO HIS JOB IN PROTECTING US FROM AUNT HILDA CALLING GRANDMA EDNA ABOUT THE KNITTING MEETING BEING POSTPONED!

[UpInArms]

4. That "knitting meeting" was code for "terror cell"

dontchaknow :eyes:

[neoblues]

2. While it certainly is a bold faced lie...

it's probably still an example of Orwell's Newspeak/Doublespeak; and relies upon people suppressing their own mind's ability to recognize the lie--or rather, to see it but not see it. Rationalizations like "well, if you don't have anything to hide" is just a tool with which to make accepting the falsehood while still believing it's true, easier.

[MountainLaurel]

3. A terrific closer

"Shame on us, in being so far behind and so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). He was referring to the Senate, but he could have been speaking for the entire nation.

Ultimately, the responsibility for these activities being allowed lies with regular Americans.