Trust In The Law

I've been spending this week trying to come up with a soundbite to rebut the Bush administration regarding this whole domestic surveillance program of wiretapping Americans in order to determine who's talking to Al Qaeda and who's talking to his grandmother in Alsace.

It's not easy, and I consider myself fairly adept at condensing and coalescing information into byte-size chunks.

I mean, yes, if we could trust any administration to use this power wisely, it might be one thing. Even then, we have to put in stops to keep corrupt Republican neo-conservative fascists politicians from abusing this for, say, wire tapping Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate.

Which is what I believed FISA was meant to do.

You see, that's a huge chunk of information, that paragraph. It's not easy to spit that out when you have some right-wing moron shouting "9-11 changed everything! War on terror! Al QAEDA!!!!!!!"

So I'm watching a repeat of West Wing last night...ol' Alan Alda is playing Arnie Vinick and is shining his shoes when Josh Lyman (played ably by Bradley Whitford) walks in to offer him the post of UN Ambassador. Vinick, a moderate Republican (which is kind of like saying a 6 kiloton nuke is a moderate nuke), lectures Josh on the importance of shining shoes and how a man who shines his own shoes is a man he can trust. Somehow, this segues into a discussion of government:

"The Founding Fathers didn't set up a government based on trust. They could have designed a government based on trust in our ability to govern fairly but they knew that power corrupts so they invented checks and balances. That was genius. The Founding Fathers did not want me to trust you and they did not want you to trust me."

BAM! There's your soundbite.

snarkasm, snarcasm, snarky

Bush, domestic spying, domestic surveillance

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