Sunday, May 14, 2006
More Wiretapping Discussion
Even The Chicago Tribune whips the Bush administration like a dog for its NSA domestic program, with Steve Chapman doing the honors. He (hilariously) mentions Valerie Plame as someone we should ask if we want to know how this administration treats confidential information.
Speaking of Plame, a new release in Libby’s trial indicates that Darth Cheney focused quite a bit on Wilson’s wife and who sent him to Africa. Libby’s defense, “But Libby, according to the indictment, told the investigators that by the next month, he had forgotten that the vice president had told him about her.”
Utter bullshit. The “I forgot” defense. The “I didn’t know defense.” How is it that every time some crooked republican administration is tried for crimes all of a sudden nobody remembers anything or knew anything?
McCain climbs Mount Hypocrisy recently to cavort with a man who blamed 9/11 on homosexuals, and then decries critics by slamming blogs.
McCain usually approaches critics this way, by saying that he knows better and puny civilians could never possibly understand the intricate workings of his magnificent mind. Two Latin words: Ad Verecundiam. I remember the video recently that was circulating on the internet of McCain mocking Barbara Streisand by sarcastically asserting that she should leave the politics to him and he would leave the singing to her.
I expect pompous nonsense like this from McCain, but he is not alone in his feelings. Molly Ivins said in an op-ed recently that she likes blogs that report news but not those that are editorial. I gather a few other famous journalists feel the same way.
To a certain extent it makes me smile. Ivins and others can insist that they are more qualified to write op-eds because they cut their teeth in investigative journalism, but when they have rank propagandists like Charles Krauthammer and laughable historians like Victor Davis Hanson among their ranks (not to mention a “polemicist” like Ann Coulter) they are hardly in a position to assert the superiority of their profession.
The written word is a medium that many are skillfull at using, and I thank God for the opportunity to read sober and intelligent bloggers like Glenn Greenwald or hilarious polemicists like Driftglass. Analytical bloggers like Glenn Greenwald certainly don’t litter any debates with appeals to authority, as McCain seems fond of.
Add arrogance to the hypocrisy of McCain’s sudden friendliness with one of the ugliest and most divisive Americans alive.
More NSA stuff. Remember that poll taken the day of the revelations about the NSA domestic program? Something like 63% of people said they had no problem with the program.
As I and Glenn Greenwald said, a poll taken that quickly and worded that poorly won’t produce results that are very accurate. Newsweek’s latest poll indicates that 53% think the president’s program has gone too far. A more detailed deconstruction of the questionable pollster at the Washington Post was done by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.
This has been a while in coming. A couple of weeks ago Greenwald and Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake both pointed out that the Bush administration was using the “state secrets” defense against the lawsuit the EFF brought against AT&T in February alleging that AT&T was piping call data right into NSA computers without any kind of court order or warrant. Informed bloggers were sure that this was part of a larger pattern of NSA call record monitoring.
Misperceptions about the program persist, despite some pretty intelligent commentary in the blogosphere. I would like to mention to McCain and Ivins that there has been a more thorough discussion of this topic in the blogosphere then there has been in any newspaper or magazine, by a factor of about ten.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 12:17 PM 
