Congress Protests Bush Domestic Surveillance
by RonChusid December 16th, 2005 @ 8:55 pm
The Washington Post reports on Congressional response to the news that Bush authorized spying on American citizens. While many members objected, once (and perhaps future) Republican Senate leader Trent Lott expressed a different opinion. “I don’t agree with the libertarians,” said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.”
For the rebuttal we go to Benjamin Franklin:
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
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I think DiFi nailed it here in her floor statement – http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=1425
Call me the cynical but it seems the news media sat on alot of information that was important for the public to know about last year during the election. It is clear they wanted bush to get re-elected and they more than helped him out by lying on Kerry and withholding information.
I wonder what else they are sitting on? I wouldn’t be suprised if they weren’t tapping kerry’s phones and the times knew about that to.
legal folks were saying today that bush and crew broke the law in spying on usa citizens making calls overseas.
I think the times is in cahoots with the bush crew and they hoped to get this story out now than deal with it in the 06 elections. They also knew if it came out now the patirot act would probably fail to be renewed and the gop can use this in 06 to flame dems for not being tough on national security.
Now, how much you want to bet the color code terror alerts will be back in full affect in the coming months? Say when delay verdict comes in or if abramoff sings like a canary, or rove is indicted.
The times owes the american citizens an apology for once again putting their paper ahead of the public good. Why people still but this rag is beyond me.
I am no great defender of the MSM…but this was released in a rather timely fashion in that the re-vote on the Patriot act may certainly now have a spotlight on it before the vote. Now that everyone has an example of this kind of abuse brought to their attention, they may lean on their respective senators and say: See, we are already losing our civil liberties with this administration, what are you going to do about it? The White House’s big argument all along about the PA is that “no civil abuse” can be sited…this clearly shows they are not rersponsible in how the yeild civil powers and that they consistantly lie about their actions.
I know in my state of Florida our resident democratic senator Bill Nelson is typically very conservative about these issues concerning “the terror threat”…yet he voted to filibuster on this re-vote of the Patriot Act.
Now, back to the MSM…I would like to think that now that they have released this information about spying on citizens by this administration, they at least used this moment concerning the PA vote as a window.
I do agree that holding back this kind of sensitive information is unconscionable, I think they made a concious effort on the window of release, or it appears as such.
There’s a problem with bashing the MSM too often. While they certainly dropped the ball during Bush’s first term they are still the ones in the best position to reveal what is really going on.
The right wingers realize this, which is why they always attack the MSM despite the fact that the MSM pretty much supported them during both Bush’s first term and the Clinton impeachment.
We need to both criticize them for what they’ve done wrong and support their continued existence and independence.
If the MSM seems to be doing the bidding of the party in power, it can be easily explained by wanting access. They’ve got a business to run, and they need access to key players in order to do that.
What’s changed now, perhaps, is that they realize they’ve got the bushies over a barrel–poll numbers are down and they don’t have so much weight to throw around anymore. And now they seem to have decided that they need to get the prez out into the media if they have any hope of regaining it–so the MSM is in the driver’s seat, so to speak. Now maybe they will let the true journalists among them get more visibility!
It really is mindboggling that they held this story so long. So the “liberal” NY Times proved once again they were in bed with Bush. I hope this is a huge lesson for the rest of them.