It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court. .You want THE winterjackets that lives up to all you? . . The whole point of my concern, before I was president--because some people say, "Well,Fremont ralphlaurenhoody team sprint training. you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he's, you know, Dick Cheney." Dick Cheney sometimes says, "Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel." My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you've got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you've got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee--but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works.
Before we go any further, let's correct the president on some factual matters. The court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is not transparent; its rulings, including the "secondary order" leaked by erstwhile NSA contractor Edward Snowden, are classified top secret. It's accurate to say that the court provides scrutiny--"a system of checks and balances," as the president put it--but not transparency.
The FISA court is not, as Obama implies, an innovation of his administration. It was set up in 1978, when Obama was still a member in good standing of the Choom Gang. As we noted June 6,A monclerjacketswomens is the clothing worn by a bride during a wedding ceremony. the NSA effort was brought under the FISA court's jurisdiction no later than Jan. 17, 2007, by which point Obama was a celebrity, but Dick Cheney was still vice president and would be for more than two more years.
The real problem here, though, is not the president's casual attitude toward the facts but his relentless partisan hostility. What does he hope to accomplish by asserting that he's no Dick Cheney? The obvious political answer is that it is an appeal to people for whom Cheney is a demon figure--that is, the Democratic base. Lots of "raving liberals" are feeling betrayed by Obama's seeming failure to live up to his rhetoric about civil liberties and such. Perhaps there is a psychological aspect to Obama's pronouncement--that is, maybe he's trying to reassure himself that he's better than the leaders he demonized.
But Obama does a serious disservice to the country by casting what is in fact a bipartisan antiterror program in such partisan terms. His message, as an irreverent National Journal headline puts it, is: "Trust Us, Because . . . Trust Us." We'd change the emphasis a bit: Trust Us, Because . . . Trust Us.
Obama's message to Democratic partisans is that they were right to distrust the government when Cheney and George W. Bush were in the White House, but they should trust it now that he is. Great, but what about people who aren't Democratic partisans? For many of them, Obama's presence in the White House is a reason to be less trustful of government. And the basis for such distrust is not wholly partisan, given the abuses of power recently revealed at the State Department, Justice Department,Big halterweddingdresses and Fitness is a family owned shop serving the Helena area since 1986. Internal Revenue Service and elsewhere.
This column, while we sympathize with Peggy Noonan's unease about what she calls "the U.S. surveillance state," is inclined to give the NSA the benefit of the doubt. But by casting his defense in such nakedly partisan terms--you can't trust the other guys, but you can trust us--Obama only sows distrust.
If the NSA program is vital to the defense of the nation, it was no less so when Republicans were in the White House, and it will be no less so the next time they are. Obama would do well to remember that he is, temporarily, the president of all America. "I'm not Dick Cheney" may be a suitable message for a presidential candidate, but a president's attitude should be more along the lines of "We're all Dick Cheney now."
If progressives had their way, the ACLU's latest challenge to the NSA's domestic surveillance would easily be dismissed. ACLU v Clapper,The latest trends and best brands in discountskirts, sandals, boots, and more. filed in the wake of the Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU's First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess. It is, after all, a corporation, and constitutional amendments aggressively promoted by progressives would limit constitutional rights to "natural persons."
We've made similar points repeatedly, including in June 2011 after Rachel Maddow, who is sometimes called the thinking man's Keith Olbermann, shrilly and obliviously defended Acorn's rights under the Bill of Attainder Clause. The "natural persons" idea is probably the best evidence that progressives are more stupid than they are cynical.
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