Letters to the Editor
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Does Bush have dementia?
Someone in the press corps would have had legitimate grounds to ask that question yesterday. President Bush said that critics say we can still engage in surveillance under FISA, but that's not true because FISA is outdated and has gaps in it blah blah yada yada.
Couldn't one single member of the press corps have asked if that's the case why did the president tell Congress when they previously offered to update FISA that he already had all the tools he needed.
Don't these people mind being lied to?
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Wire Tapping Timeline
We still do not know when the illegal wire taps began. The president has said he needs to spy on Americans to keep us safe after the events of 9/11. If Bush claims the spying occurred as a response to 9/11, then you can be pretty sure it occurred before 9/11.
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Enough!
Dear Glenn,
Will you please stop the Capitalization of any Word or Phrase You Mean to Impugn? We get it.
Love,
Everybody
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Did you know that you can read the news coverage every day
And be blissfully unaware that
A: The lawsuits in play were filed over two years ago and any non-cooperation of telecom companies can't be due to the existence of the suits.
B: The suits were filed two years ago and the Republican controlled Congress did absolutely nothing to address this dire situation.
C: The law passed in August did not include telecom immunity and yet this is the law (not FISA) who's expiration is apparently making us less safe.
D: or not.
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GG
In a functioning democracy, when high political officials break the law, such behavior is actually supposed to be "disclosed," not concealed.
I've made the point at least twice before and it has dropped into the blogosphere like a feather into a black hole.
Bush 41 preemptively pardoned Caspar Weinberger in order to keep his own involvement in Iran Contra from reaching the light of day.
The Democrats and the press said little to nothing then, what is happening now is just more of the same.
I'm not aware of a preemptive pardon ever being exercised before in the history of the Republic, are you?
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Some questions that should be asked
I've been on a personal vendetta of late, trying to put out the concept that if (when) amnesty is signed into law, there should be an unrelenting campaign specifically targeting Jay Rockefeller, insisting that he hold hearings in the Senate Intelligence Committee to get a full disclosure, to the full committee (in secret when necessary) of the extent of the illegal actions taken both by the telecom companies and by the administration.
At the time of the passage of the Protect America Act, members of Rockefeller's committee were shown documents by the government while they were deliberating the bill. A primary focus of any hearing should be to compare what was shown to Congress with what Comey, Ashcroft, Goldsmith and Mueller knew to be going on that was so patently illegal. My guess is that the committee was only shown what the program became after these objections and that nothing relating to what transpired before the hospital confrontation has ever been disclosed to Congress. There are claims by the administration that appropriate disclosure has taken place to various Congressional leaders in the past, but I would be shocked if the activities that had conservatives like Comey and Goldsmith so worked up have been shown to anyone outside those who cooked up and carried out the plan.
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Question about Comey's testimony
Why the hell didn't Congress, or at least the security-cleared Intelligence Committees, immediately go into a closed-door session to quiz Comey on just exactly what had spooked all those Bush appointees into threatening a mass resignation?
That nobody in Congress at this late date still has a clue, or even seems to have an interest in the subject, defies belief.
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hidden permanently?
You and others often make the claim that if the telecoms are given immunity we will never be able to find out what was being done because the lawsuits will be closed off. So, let me ask a naive question: Why can't the next president just reveal what happened? I can imagine the Bush administration is terrified about some of their secrets coming out. I imagine Obama, for example, could reveal some of them, some of them the administration may conceal (e.g., shred)beforehand, and some may be protected even if the next president wanted to reveal it. In which of those categories does this spying activity fall? Could Obama or whoever tell us what happened?
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Don't these people mind being lied to?
It depends on who is doing the lying..
And about what..
Blue dresses? They mind a great deal.
Illegal spying? Not so much..
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Don't these people mind being lied to?
Consider the alternatives: Everyone gets sent to bed without supper. The last suddenly become the first. The cameras turn elsewhere. The money stops. The music stops, too, and Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, David Broder, Joe Klein, and a host of others suddenly find themselves without chairs.
Expect a lot more hysteria from Washington as nemesis approaches. Pull the Lazy-Boy closer to the television. Make some popcorn. Bring on the clowns.
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Yes, I suspect there is a boogie man in the closet, in there with a smoking gun or two ...
I agree and I suspect that it's not actually "telecom immunity" that is the issue, it's keeping the "process" secret.
I think the more interesting question is WHO assured the telecoms WHEN that they were ALREADY operating legally under some special authority and what if any documentation of that promise exists.
Bush seems to be saying, "We promised them that their cooperation was legal (and/or they had some special "presidential type" immunity) and so you need to cover my backside (at least until the end of my term).
I suspect this "promise" (and deliberate violation of FISA) is an impeachable offense ... and I suspect a paper trail exists that would come out during any litigation.
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Glenn, haven't you heard?
We're post-partisan now.
We've transcended politics.
Disagreement is inherently partisan and thus nasty and SO over. Bipartisanship, man.
The party lines are no longer linear, but projected onto a non-Euclidean space.
Such argument between two points of view shall be resolved through discussion and negotiation. Both sides deserve a say.
We all agree now. This is the Antepartisan Age, and we're on the Transcendental Express.
Embrace it.