You know, I’ve been on the front lines of the First Amendment battle most of my adult life. But I WATCHED you silently accept this stuff because “keeping safe” was much more important than privacy or constitutional concerns, and now attempting to pretend that it’s OBAMA doing it is the last signpost on your journey to declare intellectual bankruptcy. Man up (or Woman): you bought it, you said nothing. Now don’t act surprised at the crime you’ve aided and abetted. Either admit your culpability or else shut the hell up.
I know, you followed the link and you are wondering, “What heck is he linking to that guy for?”
Well, here is why; when the man is right, he is right. No, not about the GOP. 🙄 About the spying issue at hand! Much hay is being raised about this whole program and the same people who were bitching about it; left and right, were the same ones who stood silently, when Bush was doing it and/or were the ones who bought the lies of Barack Obama, when he said he would end it, like everything else he promised to end, when he ran for President the first time.
I am also reminded of the words of Ed Morrissey:
Hypocrisy is an unfortunately ubiquitous condition in politics, but in the case of NSA seizing Verizon’s phone records, it’s particularly widespread. Some of the people expressing outrage for the Obama administration’s efforts at data mining had a different attitude toward it when Bush was in office. Conversely, we’ll see some people defending Obama who considered Bush evil incarnate for the same thing.
Either way, we’re left with the situation of having the federal government seizing private records without any meaningful civil due process that engages the citizens affected, whether that includes actual wiretaps or just cataloguing our calls and movements. Perhaps this will move this issue out of the partisan sphere and into a common ground in which we can all work to define exactly how far we’re willing to go in trading privacy for security. In order to get there, we’d all better recognize the hypocrisy that has abounded on this issue for far too long, and start thinking about higher principles than party affiliation when it comes to national security and constitutional protections.
It’s not perfect; but, hey, it’s a start! 😀