Monday Blue State Blues in a Red State World

“Your calls are important to us. For quality control and training purposes, the rest of your life will be monitored.”


While we were all distracted by the antics of Cheney, the tale of Scooter and the Shooter, bigtime conservatives tried to sweep this whole warrantless wiretapping thing under a rug of complications. First they claimed it's a matter of the president's prerogative. "He wants to bug somebody. He bugs them. That's what a commander-in-chief does."
Then they applied a legal paint job. "Congress said he could when they authorized his use of force against terrorism." Then they hammered it down with the big gun. The golden oldie. Their game-saving Hail Mary. National security. "If you disagree with listening in on al Qaida, you're endangering the troops and giving the terrorists a signed blank check of approval."
I keep hearing the argument that this is not a black and white issue, that it is our lives and freedom at stake and that this is a very complicated/complex issue. It's not complicated or complex at all. He broke the law. Peed on the Constitution. Flipped off the Founding Fathers. The kicker is that he didn’t have to break the law to accomplish what I think he was trying to do. I am not an expert on Constitutional law but a little research goes a long way. All he had to do was notify the FISA court within three days of when he started eavesdropping. In previous trips to the court, buttloads of wiretaps were okayed and almost none turned down. I read in The Washington Post that the numbers were something like 18,000 approved and 5 refused. WOW! Eighteen thousand out of 18,005. Not a bad return. I am not a base ball guy but I think that a .999 batting average is pretty impressive.
I don't know why he didn't go to the court. Maybe he worried they wouldn't buy these specific warrants. Maybe he stretched the definition of terrorist to include Michael Moore's dog walker. Maybe he suspects David Gregory has a mole in the Justice Department. Or maybe he just really believes he is above the law. Prehapes he is as dumb as he comes off as. I know he claims during wartime to possess special powers. Special powers: I love that. He can't even pronounce “nuclear” correctly and yet he has special powers. What X-Ray vision? The power to veto with a single bound?. I don't want a president with special powers; I want a president to uphold the laws he swore to protect even if I disagree with his administrations platform.I constantly hear humorous comparisons to Mad King George III (Remember him from your American history class?), I have even mad Mad George jokes myself however in reality George Bush is no where near as fascinating as the English king he so often is compared to. If it were for Georges madness and the name thing no comparison could be mad. The real King George was actually not that bad of a head of state when he wasn’t busy being insane. George W is no George III.
He's starting to make less sense the homeless man that is always hanging out behind the library, asking me for cigarettes and telling me about the gremlins that live in his pants.Bush said he didn't want any time lapse-interval standing in the way of fighting terrorism. Hello! George! Tutor time! Go ask Condoleezza; she went to school and actually studied. Have her tell you about the whole space-time continuum deal. How what happens afterwards doesn't affect the speed of what went on before. In other words, killing a chicken does not alter how many eggs it has laid in its lifetime. Might put a slight crimp in the number to be laid in the future, but the past tense is finite. Hell, you said it yourself. "The past is over." Its a reality thing. They may not have lived in the real world at Yale, but I'm pretty sure they talked about it.
And stop with the silly charge that the person who told the press about the program is the real bad guy. That they brought the plan to the attention of Al Qaida. Any terrorist who doesn't know that talking on an open, unencrypted line is on a fast track to 72 perfumed virgins and probably not trusted by the big turbans to do anything more important than run out to get the scorched coffee and day-old baklava. Besides, we're never going to understand the mind of al Qaida. These guys spell their name with a "Q," it's not followed by a "U" and use a little “a” for the first letter of their name. They play by rules we don't even understand.
I am beginning to think that Bush really has no idea what is going on. The people pulling the strings are all profiting heavily from the war economy, Christ it’s almost enough to make you think their might be something to all this “Illuminati” bullshit that gets tossed around by the conspiracy-new world order nuts, almost but not quite. I am a native southerner and while we didn’t invent bullshiting we certainly refined it into one of the finer of the literary arts so we can sniff it out pretty readily. Kinda like that “Gay-Dar” thing you hear so much about.
I don’t think Bush is an evil man but I do think he is dangerous. The damage to civil liberties his administration is poised to do could set us up for a future dictatorship and in the short term increase the likely hood of a nightmarish attack along the scale of 9/11. Most everyone agrees that that is inevitability. Bush and his cronies war on terror might satisfy the need to see justice done for the obscene 9/11 events we have but it does nothing to address the root causes. In fact it is little more than revenge. We as free citizens have to be vigilant and proactive about protecting our lives and our freedoms. America and Europe stand as the world leaders on the thresh hold of what could be the next great age of man or possibly an Armageddon. We have the potential to do great good for the world or initiate great harm. The choice is with us. Some where between exterminating the Nazi’s (Good) and now we have gotten a little confused in our agendas. The fall of the U.S.S.R. and the conclusion to the cold war have left us without a clear enemy and “without an enemy anger gets confused” (To quote the late great Elliot smith). Yes terrorism is a major issue we must address; we have ignored it too long. It is no longer an Israeli or Northern Ireland issue but one that is right at our door. Iraq should have been dealt with in 1991, Iran in 1979 and north Korea in the 50’s. We are way behind. Where was this heroic conscious when Po Pot was doing his thing? Tiananmen square? It’s the hypocrisy of it all that kills me. We kiss China’s ass because they have the potential to be a vast economic market and resource not to mention if we fucked with them they have the muscle to spank us. No one should take a population of billions lightly. I personally think we should be watching the Chinese not pissed off religious maniacs with homicidal policies.
Any way that’s my little rant for this Monday morning, I am off to feed the critters, and get ready for the day…I hate it when I am this grumpy this early in the day. I should know better than to read the news before I have my coffee and good morning cigarette.