OMG OMG OMG!!!!! (Update)
For almost eight years you could hardly get a word in edge-wise past the wailing and whining about the Evil Bush's Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping and his infringement on everyone's rights from the left in any debate, argument or conversation.
Yet here we are under an Obama Presidency with a Democrat majority Congress and all I hear is crickets with regards to not only this administration's support for said warrantless wiretapping, but their latest power grab vis-a-vis control of the internet.
Update by Pitbull: Just to prove our case, here is the full text of what the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in an article updated on Instapundit's site:
We had hoped this would go differently.
Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments.
First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.
It's an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." He was right then, and we're dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.
Sad as that is, it's the Department Of Justice's second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.
This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.
Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses "sovereign immunity" from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government's ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.
Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ's radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama's own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.
This isn't change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.
We fucking told you so, didn't we? Dubya is looking pretty good about now, eh? Let's wait and see when (or even if) the Kool-Aid drinkers make their argumentative gyrations to justify this.
Who's sorry now?
Who's sorry now?
Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow?
Who's sad and blue?
Who's crying too?
Just like I cried over you?
Right to the end
Just like a friend
I tried to warn you somehow
You had your way,
Now you must pay
I'm glad that you're sorry now.
Right to the end
Just like a friend
I tried to warn you somehow
You had your way,
Now you must pay
I'm glad that you're sorry now
But, don't you see? We mustn't waste taxpayers' time and money on examining the president's "lies, obfuscations, reverses from his campaign promises, and power grabs". The American people understand that that time and money would be much better spent investigating and charging and incarcerating the members of the last administration, paying highest attention to those criminals, Bush, CHENEY, and ROVE! When are the American people going to wake up and write their representatives in congress that it is imperative to get rolling on these indictments?
I lie awake at night, I can't sleep because nobody is going after those criminals. How can anyone not love our current president? He is so moving, so gasp, breathtaking, so tall, so oohhh. But BUSH! Aaaarrghhh. We MUST do something to them to punish them, to,.. why isn't anyone listening to me? Is everyone asleep? I can't stand him!!! Where, why, what, when, who?????? sputter, sputter, hate, love, where, wh....Aaaahhhhh!
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Kidding aside, what's your opinion? In the two years I've read this site I've yet to read a lengthy, intelligent post on warrentless wiretapping. Judging from the tone and tenor of the posts and comments, it's perfectly fair to ask if you'd be this cavalier had a Democrat won in 2000 or 2004 and 9-11 had still happened.
Val, are you stating that you've never been against warrentless wire-tapping even though it is infringing on your right as an American citizen, a right to privacy? What if all of the sudden there was a crack down on people believed to be terrorist--anyone including you or me, because of what we said on the phone, or the internet, etc--and we are hauled off to unknown facilities, presumably tortured and interrogated. What then? I mean how much of this really has to be spelled out for someone to get that The Patriot Act, as well intentioned as it might have seemed after 9/11, strips you of the very thing that keeps you and your family safe, your privacy. And I blame our 43rd just as much as I blame our 44th president for continuing the Patriot Act, and basically everything from stealing the presidency with his lies to making us look like a weak country in front in his European (acid)trip.
The fact of the matter is that because of the Patriot Act no one is safe, the mere word and feeling of being safe is just an illusion. I've said it before and I've said it again, the president is but a puppet and is given certain functions to look like he has power, yet we are being ruled by an oligarchy, the parties are bought and paid for by them to bicker and give us a show in where they're at each other's throats. Distracting and misguiding us.
Y Val, yo no te estoy criticando ni nada, yo dama te estoy diciendo lo que yo a visto en la noticias, y poniendo pedezos de rompecabezas en su lugar.
To just end and sum up what I'm saying is that The patriot Act is not very Patriotic at all.
I reread your post and it cancels out my question if you are or against the Patriot Act. Everything else I said still holds.
The post was not about warrantless wiretapping; it was about liberal hypocrisy in the face of the new developments we referenced. The fact that a law was passed (The Patriot Act) that permits warrantless wiretapping doesn't make it any less egregious and a violation of my Fourth Amendment rights.
Which is why I retracted my question, and after rereading I noticed just what you mentioned. Esto es como cambiando Bastista por Fidel...Naturally we would want Batista back...at least his corruption doesn't affect us, unless people did something about it.
Sorry, George and Val, but you're both wrong. Most of the disgust has come from the left. This is a pretty good aggregate of what the Bush AND Obama administrations' most relentless critic has posted:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/09/tpm/index.html
And if here's Talking Points Media's excerpt:
"During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized Bush for being too quick to invoke the state secrets claim. But last Friday, his Justice Department filed a motion in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit, brought by the digital-rights group EFF. And the Obama-ites took a page out of the Bush DOJ's playbook by demanding that the suit, Jewel v. NSA, be dismissed entirely under the state secrets privilege, arguing that allowing it go forward would jeopardize national security.
Coming on the heels of the two other recent cases in which the new administration has asserted the state secrets privilege, the motion sparked outrage among civil libertarians and many progressive commentators. Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move "demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann called it "deja vu all over again". An online petition -- "Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping" -- soon appeared."
Alfred Soto,
You miss the point of the post. It doesn't matter if the anger against Obama on this comes from the left. The point of the post is that Obama, the candidate constantly criticized Bush for using wiretapping, but Obama, the president not only follows Bush's lead, but outdoes Bush by even blocking court review. Just another of his about faces when it suits his purposes.
Also, Bush was correct on this issue and never got a break from the left. He didn't do warrantless or illegal wiretapping. He got the courts involved and restricted his eavesdropping to calls made to and from suspicious countries. I never felt any fear over such listening in. Rather I felt safer.
But where Obama is concerned, he doesn't restrict his listening. And he doesn't want the courts to be allowed to stop him. He could listen in on anyone's phone calls and why shouldn't we all feel threatened if he decided to listen so he could ferret out those who disagree with him?
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