The Bug Stops Here by DonkeyHotey
A caricature of President Obama opining "The bug stops here", alluding to his defense of data mining of Americans.
The Obama administration, on the defensive since Wednesday's "Guardian" newspaper revelation that Verizon is required to provide the NSA all their call logs of Americans, without specific cause or suspicion of law breaking, plus the new revelations of the NSA gaining access to internet providers Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other companies emails and other data, came out swinging yesterday in defense of the data mining operation with the president saying, "it was worth our doing" to protect the country.
And further the president "seemed" to allude, 100% security was possible stating, "You can't have 100% security and also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have make some choices as a society". Funny, but have the American people made the "choice" to give their government the okay to indiscriminately vacuum sweep all they say electronically? Or is their government saying "trust us", our only interest is your security".
Before going any further, let's be clear; there is no such thing as 100% security! That's like saying it's possible we can achieve 100% immunity from disease.
For propaganda purposes, the president's statement to the naà ¯ve and true believers made perfect sense i.e. "I'll give you 100% security but only if you're willing to trust whatever we do to give you that security".
It's the same type of hyped logic that went into passing the Patriot Act and the AUMF, the Congressional resolution granting the president the authority to use all "necessary and appropriate force against those that planned, authorized and committed the September 11 attacks" i.e. our security was breeched on September 11 by terrorists commandeering commercial airliners and flying them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon so we're going to send in the army to get them and kill them and all terrorists wherever they are in our "global war on terror".
But that's typical of what we do. We attempt to kill a gnat with a sledge hammer. Not only does it create a lot of "collateral damage" of innocents. But in our indiscriminate swinging of that sledge hammer it not only doesn't kill it, but that gnat lives on to breed a slew of thousands more gnats.
The data mining of Americans and the insinuation that without it their security would be compromised fits perfectly with the government's intention of making Americans fearful, the necessary ingredient to get them to forfeit their liberty which under the Constitution is supposed to protect them from the unlawful intrusion by the government.
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