Bush, Saturday, on the House’s refusal to pass a surveillance bill he wanted: “At midnight, the attorney general and the director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad … We may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America.”
Wow, am I terrified. It’s amazing the Islamofascists haven’t blown us all up in our beds already since we can no longer eavesdrop … oh, wait, silly me, I’m acting like the president is telling the truth.
The facts are, the FISA already in place allow America to eavesdrop on terrorists as much as we wish; we can even apply for a warrant 72 hours after surveillance starts.
The bill in Congress is about liberalizing the rules to allow more spying with no warrants or oversight at all. And that’s always a bad thing, because our government’s fondness for spying on its own people—easy to do if there’s no oversight—goes back long before the current regime.
In the second place, as I noted in an earlier post, if this bill isn’t passed, it’s the White House’ fault. The House wanted an extension; Bush refused to grant it. The House has some reservations about giving telecommunications company amnesty for illegally turning over phone records at the White House’ orders, and Bush refused and rejected several compromise proposals.
I’ve no doubt all the rightwingers who blog, write columns and deluge the Daily News with letters about how the Islamofascists are coming to kill us are now throbbing with outrage about our president’s failure to negotiate a compromise on such a vital, important issue—oh, who am I kidding?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 6:32 am and is filed under Politics, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.