Where Your Dick Was When You Needed It

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NSA
Good stuff, good stuff. All this wiretapping business ("eavesdropping" is so Emily Bronte) is tearing up (slithering through) Washington, and it's a good thing these people take vacations, because none of it was making any sense.

Here's the gist as I understand it: Congress, who with respect to presidential popularity has noticed the wind don't blow the way it used to, is up in arms because President Bush has been secretly listening in to telephone conversations without so much as a warrant for over four years.

Of course, members of Congress admit that they were informed of this illegal practice, and agree with Bush's assertions that he gave them scads of regular updates. They are now so appalled because... mmm, because some civilian with a typewriter found out. So now elected officials are sputtering things like "Of course, I knew, but they wouldn't really tell me, so how could I really know?" These people couldn't investigate their shoes.

And if you thought perhaps Bush would get off free here: far from it. Even Colin Powell -- who maintains a good chunk of respect from this corner for occassionally bucking the party line, declining to run for office himself, and then quitting when he felt things were out of hand -- says the presidential mandate to forego warrants is peachy, and should "of course" continue.

Bush's own justification has been: we could have gotten those warrants easily.

Great. And, the sixty-four thousand dollar question, sing along with me here, folks: So why didn't you?

(Another nice justification: there are, as far as we know, only about five hundred of these wiretaps going on at any one time. So it's not like they're doing all of us: just some of us, all the time.)

Enough said about that particular news item. Today a related one emerges, and we should have seen this one coming. It seems the National Security Agency also used illegal wiretaps to secure arrests and convictions of actual bad guys. You might figure this is the best justification yet for ignoring laws so completely: results.

You figure wrong.

Because of the NSA's brazen policy, several dozen defendants with ties to al Qaeda are mounting legitimate legal challenges in Florida, Ohio (do these states sound familiar?), Virginia, and Oregon. Meaning we could be faced with thirty or forty al Qaedets walking the streets olly olly oxenfree, thanks to behavior that destroys our civil liberties for the sake of catching terrorists.

Nice work, you fat, white fucks.

POL
And elsewhere on today's front page: prosecutors cut a deal with former high-level ENRON accountant Richard A. Causey, which they hope brings them closer to convictions (or settlements) against ENRON moguls Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay.

Well, hey, we should be glad they're going after these guys. After all, if you've been reading your Noam Chomsky or that biting Harold Pinter Nobel speech that's been going around, you know that criminals with names like... well, like Bush, have been wreaking economic devastation and all-out war against innocent nations for decades, and won't see the inside of a jail cell unless it's on Martha Stuart: Behind the Music.

But, as a tax-paying Californian, I have to point out that, in this particular case, the biggest criminals are not only those defendants but Vice President Dick Cheney, who knew about at least some of their massive deception and nevertheless subsidized their anal rape of the California economy -- oh, and then invited them over to help shape energy policy for the nation.

For some reason, Cheney continues to refuse to release any information related to the formation of that national energy policy. We all know about Lay and the rest of them coming over with punch and fruitcake. I think the holdup is that a former Texaco exec's pre-teen daughter bled all over the Lincoln Bedroom carpet, and "unckie Dick" wants to protect her family from undue embarrassment.

MR

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"I can't keep looking at loneliness
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