The dishonesty is staggering

The lies and distortions spewed by the Republicans and AG Alberto Gonzales during his appearance yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee were nearly impossible to keep up with and even harder to stomach.

As mentioned by notable commenter Dissenter in a thread below, perhaps the most maddening was the blatant attempt by Bush and other administration apologists to suggest that Democrats are arguing against surveillance of "terrists" altogether.

This stunning and willful attempts to confuse the matter, ignores the fact that what's at issue is Bush breaking the law and subverting the constitution by completely bypassing the requirements as set out in the FISA law. A law which couldn't make it any easier to get a warrant for surveillance.

Bush's famous line from his S.O.U. speech was, "If someone's talking to Al Queda, we want to know about it."

But that's a BLATANT attempt to distort the issue. No one is arguing for the elimination of wire taps!! No one has ever suggested that wiretaps of communications between U.S. citizens and suspected terror figures is out of line in the slightest! Yet the perception repeated over and over by right wingers and the public alike is outrage that anyone could possible suggest that the U.S. shouldn't be allowed to eavesdrop on terrorists. AAAARRRRRRRGHHHH!! How can they be so slimy? So dishonest? And those who buy it, so STUPID?

The issue they're trying to distort is the fact that what Bush and his monkeys are attempting to do is to give him carte blanch to break any law he feels like.

The facts are not even in the same area code of the right wings version of this issue. Even though these facts have been available ever since this story broke, it's simply infuriating to continue to see them ignored or blatantly distorted, and especially to see Democrat after Democrat fail to even bring them up!

The FISA laws were enacted to put a check on rampant government abuse of domestic spying.

This law requires that government agencies get a warrant before engaging in spying and wire tapping, etc. This process is essentially nothing but a rubber stamp. There have been something like 20,000 requests for FISA warrants, and only about 5 or 6 have been refused. That's 5 or 6 warrants out of thousands that have ever been refused. Got that?

Even so, they argue that this is just too much of a burden on Bush and his spooks. What if they have to spy on someone, say, in the next 10 minutes? They can't be expected to go get a warrant.

OK, here's the part everyone ignores. The FISA law makes it perfectly legal to go do the intercepts or wire taps WITHOUT A WARRANT, as long as they go to the FISA court and request one within 72 hours AFTER THE FACT.

Not even Democrats mention this! When the Republicans sit there and distort the issue, the Dems sit there and go along like morons. They deserve to lose this PR battle if that's the best they can do.

So there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for Bush to insist that he be able to completely exclude the FISA court and order spying on U.S. citizens no matter when or where he feels like it. There is literally no check on this whatsoever, as no one will ever know who is being spied on, how many, or for what!

Yet these reprehensible Republicans sit there and distort, lie, and lie some more about this, Bush included, trying to suggest that the Dems are somehow upset because they're doing surveillance on terrorists. THIS IS SIMPLY A BLATANT LIE. How they still manage to sell it, and how so many buy it, is enough to make one despair if this country is even capable of preserving itself.

And one of the most loathsome boobs in existence has to be the dufus from Alabama, Sen. Jeff Sessions. The guy is a walking perpetuation of the stereotype of a dim good 'ol boy cracker from the south.

One of the arguments used by Gonzales to justify the unjustifiable was, and try to believe this, that GEORGE WASHINGTON ordered spying, Abraham Lincoln did warantless searches and ordered telegraph transmissions to be intercepted, and Wilson and Roosevelt did similar things.

What idiots! And Sessions took up his time of questioning to repeat all these supposed reasons FOR handing the Chimp unlimited and unchecked power to spy on U.S. citizens.

But don't they realize, or are they really that stupid that they truly don't realize that, rather than being arguments FOR handing Bush these unrestricted powers to spy, these are THE VERY REASON THE FISA LAW WAS ENACTED!!

The FISA statutes were enacted to put an end to the abuses by the executive branch in the past. Gonzales and Jeff "Deliverance" Sessions conveniently truncated their little timeline before it got to Nixon however. And Sessions had the nerve to say that, compared to say, 200 years ago, we have a TON of restrictions on the President. Why, we should all just relax, because there's more restrictions now than during the Civil War. What a moron! (as is anyone that falls for such crap)

Washington's wife owned slaves too. Are the right going to come out in defense of that next?

Why don't more people realize how badly they're getting hosed? I suppose they just don't have the time or interest to actually think about these things. They just hear some simple-minded thought, such as those above, and it seems to feel good. It's like eating a piece of chocolate vs some broccoli. Easier to go down, but not too good for you. The populace has gotten so dumbed down that the right can blatantly go out and treat them like morons and not pay any price whatsoever.

But worse yet was Sessions, after the hearing, trotting out the wife of the pilot of the plane which was crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11, using her as a prop in support of unchecked surveillance by Bush.

This was literally sickening. The poor woman dutifully stood up in front of the lights and recited her script, saying that she and her family fully supports the ability to wiretap terrorists, (not even remotely the issue at hand) and her reasons why. A more disgusting exploitation of someone's confusion and grief I've never seen.

And I won't even go into the fact that Committee chair Arlen Specter refused to have Gonzales sworn in even though Gonzales had said he wouldn't object to being sworn, and even though he'd been sworn in on three prior occasions when testifying before congress. Not this time.

The Dems forced a vote and it was defeated by party line vote with Sessions chiming in that it was "unseemly" and in "poor taste" to try to put a cabinet officer under oath because it should be assumed that they all have sterling integrity, that even the mere suggestion that they'd be less than truthful is an ungentlemanly insult. I mean, this actually happened!

Or the fact that the Republican majority on the committee refused to allow the Dems to introduce footage shot during the campaign showing Bush stating emphatically, "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

I've had it with these people. I only hope I'm not the only one.