Bush tramples on constitution, law, authorizes illegal spying on US citizens

Atrios is all over Bush's gross violation of the law and constitution. Many who know say that Bush clearly violated the law as well as putting himself above the constitution of the United States by repeatedly authorizing the National Security Administration to tap phones and communications of US citizens with no court oversight whatsoever.

What is even more outrageous is that there was already a process in place in which these sorts of things were sent through a secret court, FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, which to date has never refused a single search request. And no one knows when they do or much about them anyway. Yet even this fig leaf of oversight was apparently too much for Bush and his gang of thugs and spies.

Read the various posts and links at Atrios' Eshaton and get up to speed on this outrage. The exchange between Bob Barr and wing-nut Dana Rohrabacher pretty much shows how crazy those who defend this truly are.

Rohrabacher and those like him are absolutely insane to argue that we need to toss the Constitution out the window as long as we're "at war" with terrorism, which after all, is nothing but a tactic which by definition can not be defeated. Terrorism is simply a tactic used by people who don't happen to have a multi-trillion dollar military at their disposal.

For Rohrabacher to state that we only need to throw our rights away until we've "won" the war, then we can put it all back requires a childlike ignorance.

How will we know when we've "won"? Is Osama going to sign some documents on the deck of a battleship? And if we can restore our constitutional rights after this make-believe and non-existant "victory", then, well... the stupidity exibited by that remark defies explanation, but here goes:

Implicit in that is a belief that we can actually kill all the terrorists who wish us harm, and once that's accomplished, no more danger and we can have our constitution back. A ridiculous and disasterous belief that there is a finite number of "terrorists" out there, which we can defeat by throwing billions of dollars to defense contractors and by the use of billions of dollars of high tech weaponry designed for a traditional battlefront war, and sacrificing thousands of young lives.

The once we entirely eliminate terrorism from the planet (As if you can completely eliminate and end sniping, spying, ambush or any other tactic)THEN at that bright shining moment, we can hand the American people their treasured constitutional rights back. See, it all makes sense.

So.... once we "win", we can go back to being a constitutional democracy, but until then, the government can spy on whomever it wants with impunity and no oversight? If we just allow Bush to determine at will who can be declared an "enemy of the state" secretly authorize spying on his constituents with no oversight, and spy on Quaker peace groups, among other political opponents, for God's sake, and after this "victory" to a war which by definition can never be "won", we can be sure that Bush and Rohrabacher and all the rest will give us back our constitutional rights. (the very ones, by the way, that they've sworn to uphold and defend.)

Oh, ok.

Are they going to make a grand declaration that this supposed terrorist threat no longer exists, and therefore their justification for all this illegal and unconstitutional power mongering no longer applies and we can have our constitution back?

Well, if they say so, it's good enough for me. They'd never lie, they're God's Own Party.

If that's the case, I say we declare victory tomorrow, take back the rights the disgustingly named "Patriot Act" took away from us, investigate, prosecute, and impeach Bush and crew, and get back to reality. Screw it.

The best thing to happen would be to get rid of this gang of crooks, appologize to the world, move on, and try to pretend this dark blotch on our government never happened.