President Bush's ever shriller efforts to terrorize the House into passing a permanent extension of the Protect America Act have now officially passed into farce. As Bush et al put it, government investigators have been helpless to wiretap suspects ever since the House let the PAA expire a week ago. Not only that, private companies will refuse to help out without the unlimited legal immunity the bill would provide. And if the terrorist-loving, America-hating House Demon-crats don't get off their duffs and vote the right way, we'll all die horribly.
It is, of course, a big fat hairy lie.
The House rejection of the PAA does not bar government surveillance, plain and simple. All it does is require that government follow existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules in getting national-security warrants to wiretap foreign suspects. The existing law is hardly a huge burden; the FISA court almost never rejects warrants, and they can be requested retroactively by up to three days if emergency surveillance needs to start immediately. And companies are already provided immunity for complying with legal government requests for assistance.
Bush claims he objects to the House bill only because it doesn't immunize companies who secretly handed over their customers' private communications without a warrant. Indeed, he threatened that any bill which doesn't protect his corporate cronies will be vetoed regardless of whatever else it may contain. (So much for his "pass the law or we all die" line.) But he and his cronies are really throwing such a tantrum because the House finally grew a pair. They're standing up and telling him to his face, "No, we will not sanction another of your power grabs. No, you are not allowed to spy on anyone you like just because you feel like it with no accountability or oversight."
For the past six years, the GOP has been completely unable to sell their message to the American people without resorting to raw, naked, disabling fear. The fear that brown people with Arabic surnames are coming to kill us, that anyone who isn't the right kind of God-fearing Christian is a secret terrorist sympathizer, that a presidential contender whose parents gave him the middle name of "Hussein" is a Muslim version of the Manchurian Candidate.
They keep right on pushing the fear button, vainly hoping against hope that enough people will succumb to unreasoning terror to allow them to get their way one more time. And Bush himself keeps lying to the American people with a straw man argument, saying there will be no surveillance at all and "we're not going to be able to protect ourselves" unless he gets everything he wants.
But it doesn't work anymore. The human psyche simply cannot be kept distracted with fear indefinitely; instead, it inevitably slips back into a normal mindset and starts seeing all the lies for what they really are. That helps explain why Bush's approval rating has now fallen to an unheard-of 19% - because the American public has finally woken up to the fact that there's no there there.
Bush and his fearmongering cohorts are full of it. They don't give a rat's patootie about the safety of the nation, only about the expansion of their own power. And the American people realize it.
It is, of course, a big fat hairy lie.
The House rejection of the PAA does not bar government surveillance, plain and simple. All it does is require that government follow existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules in getting national-security warrants to wiretap foreign suspects. The existing law is hardly a huge burden; the FISA court almost never rejects warrants, and they can be requested retroactively by up to three days if emergency surveillance needs to start immediately. And companies are already provided immunity for complying with legal government requests for assistance.
Bush claims he objects to the House bill only because it doesn't immunize companies who secretly handed over their customers' private communications without a warrant. Indeed, he threatened that any bill which doesn't protect his corporate cronies will be vetoed regardless of whatever else it may contain. (So much for his "pass the law or we all die" line.) But he and his cronies are really throwing such a tantrum because the House finally grew a pair. They're standing up and telling him to his face, "No, we will not sanction another of your power grabs. No, you are not allowed to spy on anyone you like just because you feel like it with no accountability or oversight."
For the past six years, the GOP has been completely unable to sell their message to the American people without resorting to raw, naked, disabling fear. The fear that brown people with Arabic surnames are coming to kill us, that anyone who isn't the right kind of God-fearing Christian is a secret terrorist sympathizer, that a presidential contender whose parents gave him the middle name of "Hussein" is a Muslim version of the Manchurian Candidate.
They keep right on pushing the fear button, vainly hoping against hope that enough people will succumb to unreasoning terror to allow them to get their way one more time. And Bush himself keeps lying to the American people with a straw man argument, saying there will be no surveillance at all and "we're not going to be able to protect ourselves" unless he gets everything he wants.
But it doesn't work anymore. The human psyche simply cannot be kept distracted with fear indefinitely; instead, it inevitably slips back into a normal mindset and starts seeing all the lies for what they really are. That helps explain why Bush's approval rating has now fallen to an unheard-of 19% - because the American public has finally woken up to the fact that there's no there there.
Bush and his fearmongering cohorts are full of it. They don't give a rat's patootie about the safety of the nation, only about the expansion of their own power. And the American people realize it.
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