Tony Snow and NSA leaks
Published by Mike Stark February 8th, 2006 in Podcast, Tony SnowI trimmed the beginning and ends of this call… We talked about the launching of the blog in the beginning and he plugged it again at the end.
Before I get on with the show, just let me say this:
Thank you Tony. This might not win me a lot of friends on this side of the blogosphere, but I’m gonna say it anyway. As far as people go – let alone, wingnuts – you seem to be a pretty OK kinda guy. Hell, this bitterly partisan liberal is even starting to like you! It’s always a pleasure speaking with you and I appreciate your fair approach…
But none of that makes your politics right. Au contrair…
Case in point: today’s call.
I dunno. I kinda like what the President says about if a terrorist is making a call, he wants to know about it. Hell, I agree with that!
I mean, if Bill Clinton had been more active in tapping church phone lines, we mighta been able to pre-empt Eric Rudolph’s murders. If he infiltrated some of the dens of his political enemies and wiretapped them… maybe we wouldn’t have had Oklahoma City.
So Bush’s bold approach doesn’t sound too bad to me. The thing I don’t understand is why Bush limits his wiretaps to Al Quaeda… If it is his job to protect us, and he takes that job seriously, why wouldn’t he be tapping the phone lines of militia movements and pro-life groups? Both have a history of dastardly domestic attacks…
Oh, wait a second… as you pointed out, the FBI does get wiretaps to listen in on all sorts of folks… The mob, drug dealers, etc… And oh, yeah, they get warrants…
So why don’t they get warrants for Al Quaeda… Tony, in this call, suggested the reason for that is that Al Quaeda is too fleet afoot – we need to match their nimbleness…
We’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that these terrorists supposedly spent months training at flight schools and making practice runs to test our airport security… that doesn’t sound too nimble to me, but whatever…
No – instead let me point out that it seems like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph might’ve been a little too nimble for our law enforcement agencies… After all, they bombed us all to hell… so it begs the question… would the ability to tap their phones without a warrant have helped us out?
And while I’m at it, let me ask another question that I asked in the call – but it still doesn’t make sense to me…
Why do we need the speed provided by circumventing the FISA process when one of the principals is, quite literally, on the other side of the world… but… we don’t need that kind of speed when the threats on both sides of the call are already within our borders?
Oh, there are many questions raised by this administration’s complete disregard for law… have fun in the comments…
9 Responses to “Tony Snow and NSA leaks”
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I happened to hear you on Tony’s show and it just proves to me how fair Tony is in listening and conversing with someone who has opposite views than his own. Just wondering…one issue that you discussed was Eric Rudolph. How do you know he was supported by church members during his several years of hiding? Maybe it came out in his trial, I don’t know, but hindsight is 20-20. If true, these people should be prosecuted as accessories to the crimes he committed. I have not heard anyone has been prosecuted. If you are so certain of this, why don’t you do something about this and turn these people in to the authorities?
I can’t remember my source for the Rudolph information… I believe it was speculation I saw at the time of his arrest, but here’s a link for you:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=46
I found this link by googling “eric rudolph ’support network’”
it’s from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As far as turning people in, I think your question is a rhetorical one… I, of course, don’t have any first hand information. But I’m glad you agree that anyone that aided him should be prosecuted.
Tony Snow is a shamless liar.
And an asshole.
I don’t know where else to put this comment. It doesn’t really relate to this call but I really like your little blog here. Keep up the good work.
Even a pacifist like you cannot, even at your looniest left wing moment, believe there is a remote similarity between psychotic Islamic zealots bent on exterminating infidels (read “Al Quaeda”), and American militias or pro-life bible thumpers. If you really do, then you’re far more demented then even the majority of socialist left wing wack jobs warping cyberspace.
Yes, Bush is an elitist ass who worhsips big money interests and has gone overboard in wiretapping US citizens, but until the rabid left abandons its repugnant stances on issues like gay marriage, affirmative action and a unified world government (meaning the UN), the Dems will remain a minority party, despite disgusting whores like Tom Delay. Its a choice of lesser evils. Bush and Delay are AWFUL, but the looney left is so much worse!
The hate the right spewed at Clinton was irrational. But it pales in comparison to the utter contempt the looney left has for Bush. Most Kossacks let their emotions cloud your judgment. Your correct, the President has no authority to wiretap any American citizens on American soil. Beyond that, ther are NO limitations on what I expect my government to do to make us safer — torture, secret prisons, assisinations are all fair game. The national security deficit the Dems face stems from the fact that no lib will ever be as feared (or reviled) internationally as a guy like Bush. In the current climate, that’s PERFECT! No major attacks for 4 1/2 years when every expert predicted we would soon be like Israel with suicide bombers run amuck.
As for hating gays, I don’t. I just don’t believe the government should force me to equate a women being married to a woman with a male/female union.
Affirmative action? Its not only illegal, despite O’Connor’s tortured logic in Bollinger, but pointless in that it’s focused on the wrong problem. The beneficiaries of affirmative action are mainly the elite among minority groups, not those living in poverty.
Public education in large urban areas will NEVER EVER be effective or responsive to the needs of its constituencies as long as there are teachers unions and tenure. I am pro union, with one huge exception, teachers. If they want to be treated and paid as “professionals”, than they also need to face reality, which is that professionals do not have guarnteed jobs or the ability to dictate employment terms. And dont tell me money, at leats for salaries, is the answer. Any money should be spent on capital improvements, not the absurd pension guarantees teachers in places like new York have. I am all for providing a first class basic education to every kid from every background and it would be feasible if there were some accountablity among teachers. But there is not and affirmative action is never going to inspire some poor inner city kid to learn to read.
Lastly, the Dems and black leaders NEED a permanet victim class to stay in power so they have little incentive to ever truly want to change that.
Well, in my looniest left-wing moments, I tend towards thinking that if I were the parent of a kid killed by a terrorist of any stripe, I’d want to know what my government did or didn’t do to stop the attack. I don’t think it would matter much to me if my kid died in Oklahoma City or New York City. Dead is dead.
As such, if it is the President’s job to protect Americans, how can he justify NOT tapping the lines of a dangerous militia?
The fact is, he can’t. He goes to FISA, gets a warrant and gets the job done. Just like every President before and every President in the future… The difference between this President and all the others is that this President claims that his Constitutional Authority trumps statute… In other wrod, if the President can call his actions part of the war on terror, anything goes. And that, as Justice O’Connor has stated, is just absurd.
Hate gays if you want to. I believe in equality under the law. Everyone has a right to love who they want and to marry who they love.
Hate affirmative action if you want to. I believe in equality under the law. Until we are willing to imrove schools and living conditions in the areas of concentrated poverty, overcoming such challenges deserves a little added benefit… It isn’t predudicial – it is recognizing achievement… And, like any government program (like the death penalty), some mistakes will be made.
And as far as unified goverment goes, you are barking up the wrong tree – the UN has never threatened our sovereignty… the corporation loving WTO, on the other hand, is exactly such a threat.
The hate the right spewed at Clinton was irrational. But it pales in comparison to the utter contempt the looney left has for Bush.
No doubt the contempt we have for Bush is powerful… but I’m note sure “it pales in comparison”… To be sure, it is a more widely held sentiment - there are certainly more people that keep abreast of current events and despise Bush for any one of a million reasons (he’s given us so many)… and the hard-core Clinton haters were always a small minority of extreme wing-nuts… the poll numbers will bear that out pretty readily.
But… let’s examine the reasons for this.
1) Bush gets a PDB entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack in US” in August 2001, and despite this, never convenes a terror meeting as Richard Clarke had been pressing for
2) After we are hit on 9/11, Bush refuses to back a Department of Homeland Security until it becomes apparent that it will happen with or without him. Then he creates a fight by writing into the bill the denial of civil service protections for any new DHS employees. When Democrats stand up for workers, Bush paints them as anti-Homeland Security, runs ads against Max Cleland (a triple amputee vet) comparing him to Osama bin Laden, and stakes a claim to the “ALL POWERFUL PROTECTOR OF AMERICA”. The cynicism is breathtaking, but…
3) We shouldn’t have been surprised because after John McCain beat him handily in the 2000 NH primary, Bush’s back was against the wall going into SC. There, his campaign began the smear of John McCain by whispering that McCain had a coupla loose screws - the result of being tortured in Vietnam prisons, dontch’ya know - and can’t be trusted to run this great country… When that didn’t work, McCain, who had adopted a Bangladeshi child, was accused of fathering a mixed race, out of wedlock child… You can figure out for yourself how that went over with the brilliant hillbillies that spend their days watching the 700 Club…
4) Before he was President, he had failed at everything he tried. Beginning with Yale, where he was a C student (how does a C student get into Harvard Business School, anyway? oh, yeah, the same way he become President - on the power of his grandfather’s name), and moving on to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the oil companies he ran into bankruptcy. The only talent he ever had was trading on his family name to put together the Texas Rangers deal… a deal in which thousands of people were cheated out of their properties through eminent domain proceedings.
5) The man never learns his lessons. “Bin Laden determined to attack in US” might’ve been a wake up call for those of us that take our jobs seriously. We mighta second-guessed ourselves and decided that, in the future, we’d be a little more hands on. Instead, what do we get? “heckovajob, Brownie”…
6) The man’s administration has undermined science - sometimes to catastrophic ends. What’s up with telling the people at ground zero that they can move back into their homes - that air quality was okey-dokey? The instructions came from the WHite House and were passed through the EPA. The science didn’t matter to them, even when it was people’s health at stake. I won’t belabor the point, but we could talk all day about abstinence, global warming, environmental concerns, budgetary projections, WMD/post war projections and half a gazillion other things…
7)The constant propagandization of the American people… Our tax money has gone to conservative “team players” that have agreed to write glowing reviews of failing programs (like NCLB)… I dunno about you, but that pisses me off…
9) Probably the most maddening thing of all has nothing to do with Bush, per se. All of this has occurred against a backdrop of an intimidated press that has created a mythological figure in Bush. I’m not aware of a single mainstream media outlet that has been willing to call Bush a LIAR. After enduring years of bullshit scandals like Whitewater, Travelgate and MonicaGate - in which the press was all to eager to smear an incredibly competent and engaged President (and I say that as a Clinton hater - I really do think he was unprincipled and bad for the country) - anyway - this guy has gotten a pass for his incompetence and lying that goes way beyond anything I had ever imagined possible in a country that values freedom of the press.
I’ll come back and edit this later - there is more to your comment that I wanted to post on… but I hope this gives you an idea of why there is so much frustration and anger amongst Democrats - somehow Republican’s have come to construct an alternate reality in which their President is infallible… It reminds me of what happens in totalitarian states as despots rise to power… a bunch of lemmings create a cult of personality around their hero.
It’s something I never thought I’d see in American politics
So apparently mike you think that gays are supposed to be inferior creatures? My 7 year exclusive relationship is 10 times better than most of the heterosexual marriages of convenience, or Newt Gingrich’s 2nd or 3rd wife who got divorced on her cancer-ridden deathbed. I bet there was a time in your life when you didn’t want to equate the “wonderful hetersexuals” with the repugnant homos as fellow humans. Tell your legislator then to give us civil unions and maybe that will shut up the “whiny lefties with repugnant positions on marriage”. Remember we are talking about a CIVIL issue here.
I am not a liberal either and I agree with you much of the time.