Lt. Henderson (and to people that think this wiretapping is a good idea)
I was going to reply to you, but I happen to be reading the NY Times and editor Bob Herbert wrote today by coincidence on this very subject. He hits the nail right on the head. You need a subscription so I took the liberty of pasting it below. I highlighted parts i think are important,pay particular attention to the last paragraph I bolded.
One final point because it relates. In 2004 John Kerry did not want to remove the troops, he wanted to send more of them in. Cheney statements were designed to scare you into voting for them, and it worked. As Herbert says below, FEAR is the only asset the president has.
America the Fearful
By
BOB HERBERT
Published: May 15, 2006
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Herbert's Heroes
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
We dont object because we choose not to. The people have too much power to not stand up if they feel violated.The majority feel it is necessary in a time of war, and majority rules.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.
Terrorism. Look at the first six letters of the word. We are frightened because they kill with randomness, they attack where it hurts politically and socially, not militarily. They have no order. CHAOS. Thats what they thrive on, not orderly attacks...
Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.
Because scandal sells. Look at the Lewinski(sp?) incident...Troops could have been killed by the thousands but her face would still be plastered on the screen...
The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country.
A reporter would know?? It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.
It wants those records because a terrorist could simply give it that name. it could be addressed to "Grandma" and really be headquarters to a southern terrorist organization planning to attack Miami...In order to be effective, the screening has to cover EVERYTHING.
Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.
The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.And a reporter could do a much better job at hunting Bin Ladin...sure. lets see him run. Thats what you call scared. They talk and talk, but they cant walk the walk. All the Congress has to do is impeach him...Apparently, he is doing something right...
Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.
All the people need to do is speak up...
The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings.
Once again, all power lies in the Congress, but they arent doing anything because voters dont tell them to. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war."
He had no grounds to say that, considering he doesn't know what the Americans think.This proves my point about John Kerry being against the war by the way. If the US isn't going to start a war, why would we need troops...FLIP-FLOPPER.But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.
Pointless? So he would let the terrorists get away with attacking our nation? Interesting...
If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.
There is a limit. Its called re-election. President only serves two 4-year terms...D*OH!
So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them
.Ya know, President Lincoln suspended the writs of habeas corpus too...Why isn't this man writing articles on him too?; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.
Read above. Cover stories aren't that hard to come up with. In order to be effective...etc.
The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
Well,
I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy.Did we not attempt diplomatic solutions?Did we not attempt to send the usless UN to try to talk with Hussen?, the promotion of blind patriotism.Patriotism is never blind. You dont have to be at war to have patriotism. In fact, I consider patriotism a wonderful trait to have. We should always support the flag, what it stands for, and who is standing for it., the denial of human rights. God forbid we can't talk on the phone without computers with no emotions or judgements hearing us..., the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.See above.
There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.
