(Presidential Press Spokesman Jay Carney, who apparently has no problems sleeping. It is part of his six-step program. Photo AP)
Most of my pals have stopped making jokes about the NSA Internet surveillance program, even as Congress got around to narrowly permitting it to continue yesterday. For a while we were including a wave to the analysts at Fort Meade whenever we tweaked the government. Not so much anymore.
A couple minutes after the news came that the Congress would not stop the program- by only 15 votes in the House, the latest story broke that the Feds are not only collecting it all, but demanding passwords, too.
I am torn. I like the fact that the capability to capture just about everything that happens in cyberspace can yield tremendous advantages in nailing bad guys. I am confident that almost everyone in the system is pretty much like the people with whom I served: honorable, scrupulous in application of law and privacy, and circumspect about what they know.
I guess I am saying that you can trust people like me. General Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was clearly uncomfortable with his testimony to Congress, in which he told- well, what was it he told?
The least untruthful denial about the program he could manage?
That is faint praise. They used to call statements like that lies. But I have to give the General the benefit of the doubt. The program was authorized and approved, and the question was asked in open hearing, not in the secure spaces where actual questions about classified information can asked without security concerns.
I have worked for Jim Clapper and I respect the man enormously. He is just in a bad position, working for the people from Chicago. Which brings me around from the hard line position that Bradley Manning and Ed Snowden are traitors and need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to the position that the people in charge cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
North of Jim Clapper things are very much Chicago politics: high elbows and corruption and venom against those who cross those in power.
I give you Jay Carney, the prevaricator-in-chief and mouthpiece for the Administration. He has invented a new six-step program for addressing the truth that seems to be pretty effective, at least if you have a press corps that kisses your ass. I have to give him his due- he seems to have sidestepped some damaging information that would have derailed a Republican Administration.
The current line is that the problems the Administration brought into the summer are “phony crises,” cooked up for base political purposes by the evil Tea Party House of Representatives.
Scuze me, Mr. Carney? The murder of a US Ambassador is a phony issue? The issuing of gag orders to the survivors of the terror attack- on the freaking anniversary of 9/11- is not a cover up?
That the Infernal Revenue Service was not actively targeting political groups to suppress their first amendment rights and influence elections? Remember what they did to Tricky Dick Nixon about that? Jeeze Louise.
I forget what the other one was. Was it targeting journalists with criminal prosecution? Tagging the Associated Press for surveillance? The discriminatory policy of the EPA and HHS that permitted free release of information to groups that support the Administration and denying or charging significant sums for public data to those that do not?
Or was it the whole NSA thing we are arguing about now?
I would ask Jay Carney, but he is incapable of telling the truth. It is getting positively tiresome. The first comment in the White House Press Room- like Benghazi or the IRS- is always some wild denial and deflection. You know, it was an anti-Muslim video, not radical Islamists, who did it. Or it was just rogue agents in Cincinnati that got an improper idea and had some unsupervised fun with it.
Then there are six or seven versions and variations on a theme, until we discover that it actually was a well-planned and heavily-armed attack timed for a specific day, done by people allied with the government of Egypt to whom we give billions in aid, and which government was installed with our tacit approval. Or, that the actual decision to use the IRS as an electoral weapon actually sort of wound up in the office of the Chief Counsel in Washington, one of only two political appointees in the entire Service?
When it is finally all out there, dragged out inch by painful inch, we get the ultimate statement from the podium: “That was all a long time ago,” like murder has a statute of limitations measured in news cycles.
Or Hillary wearing those wild glasses, sternly hectoring the Senate with that faux outrage: “What does it matter?”
Anyway, we all get tired of this nonsense and just want people to act like responsible grown ups. Unfortunately, these are the people who are in charge of all that data collected by the NSA and the Postal Service and God knows who else.
They even are going to pull together all the tax AND health records into a really cool new database that will know everything about everybody.
I trust the Spooks- or at least I did. But I certainly do not trust what the United States Government has become. I wonder why CNN doesn’t cover that?
I guess Anthony Wiener is more entertaining, and this is only third second chance he is asking for. I heard about the potential dream ticket for the 2016 election, though. It looks like a sure-fire winner, and there is nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com