Nuts and bolts...

...we got screwed.

Although the story about secret wiretapping came out a few days ago, I did not want to say anything about it until I heard both sides of the story. Nothing against the New York Times, but "reliable" is a word that I rarely use with 90% of today's major media. However, having heard responses both by "President" Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, something must be said.

First let's review what happened. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Bush had authorized wiretaps to spy on Americans communicating overseas. These wiretaps would be carried out by the NSA under his authority and without knowledge of or approval by Congress (our representatives in government).

Bush's first response came Saturday as he claimed that his actions were legal and that the only illegal action was those made by the New York Times for making public a secret program designed to protect Americans in our War on Terror. Bush's quote:

"Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

Now today's comments. First, Bush's Attorney General claimed that these actions were completely legal under the Constitution as part of the President's role as Commander-In-Chief and as authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed by Congress shortly after 9-11. Next, Bush made a statement this morning that these taps would continue because "To save American lives we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks..."

Now my comments: This is complete bullshit. I am willing to provide the government some "freedom" to do some things that may seem immoral, unethical, or illegal to others in order to protect Americans (see my comments on torture in other post). However, at what point are we willing to let a President make his own interpretation of the Constitution and law in general in order for him to carry out his agenda? I feel like we have come nowhere near that point. Are we in a state of war? Sort of. We have a lot of troops fighting overseas, but the fiasco that we continue to carry on in Iraq is less of a war than Vietnam was (Vietnam was called a "police action"). I would have even given the President room to maneuver if he had at least passed this by Congress as a whole or at least the Senate Intelligence Committee. Instead, he kept it a secret, which says to me the same thing that OJ running from the cops said: Guilty. Bush knew he was doing something wrong so he kept it secret. I appreciate that this plan is less effective if it is publicly known that there is wiretapping going on, but there are a lot of secrets that Congress knows that they can't tell the public for security reasons. This is astounding to me that he may get away with this. Congress is calling for an investigation, but where did that get us in the last major investigation? What, you forgot about Libby releasing the identity of one of our CIA spies? So did a lot of people. It turns out that members of this administration have been caught with their pants down before and the investigation did not reach the higher parts of the administration where it clearly started. So now Bush is scolding the NYTimes for hurting national security just months after members of his administration did the same thing? Remember Bush promising to fire anybody involved? Did he? Nope. Karl Rove still has his job as does Dick Cheney.

The time has come, I think, for the American people to speak up with a real voice. We impeached Clinton because he lied about getting his knob polished by his chubby intern. What about this? I think the Republicans are even beginning to distance themselves from this guy, knowing that they will need a new lackey come 2008. There will always be that ultra-conservative branch that sticks by Bush to the end, but Rush Limbaugh would deny Bush's shortcomings even if Bush admitted them.

My suggestions to you the reader: #1 watch some FoxNews to see how they spin this load of crap, it should be really entertaining. #2 Write to your reps in Congress. Go to the House of Reps and the Senate to find out who they are. #3 Encourage others to do the same #4 If you are a Bush supporter please add comments so we can all see your side to this story (***cough***Peter***cough**) Actually I hope Pete that writes on Pete the Elder comments on this later because he is a Bush supporter, is very smart, and will likely give a really strong challenge to my views on this.