Just what is that’s “moderate” about this guy, again?
…if we are to speak objectively and without comparison to even more extreme actors, these “pragmatic moderates” are anything but moderate, and their insidious “pragmatism” — i.e., their pose as conventonal political operatives rather than fire-breathing jihadists — makes them more dangerous.
And Assad was a “reformer.” Just ask that idiot, Hillary Clinton.
Bibi Netanyahu is prepared to prevent it, even if Barack Obama (among others) isn’t:
“The leaders of the Allies knew about the Holocaust in real time,” Netanyahu said at the opening of a permanent exhibit called “Shoah” in Block 27 at the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum.
“They understood exactly what was happening in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.
“To us Jews the lesson is clear: We must not be complacent in the face of threats of annihilation. We must not bury our heads in the sand or allow others to do the work for us. We will never be helpless again.”
But the administration continues to fantasize that the barrier to the “peace process” is homes on the West Bank, rather than that one side that wants to destroy the other, while the other side refuses to acquiesce to its own destruction.
…look up:
What is this but the nightmare of political modernism? The constant watchers with cold, unsympathetic eyes. The men in trench coats falling in step as you leave your home. The knock on the door at three in the morning. The monster state crushing the individual, the “boot stamping on a human face forever.”
You cannot answer this with legalisms or minutiae. By pointing out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts have been on the case since 1978, carefully overseeing all government surveillance programs, that the 1986 Electric Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), the Patriot Act, and its supplementary legislation provided for further and even more rigorous safeguards. Or that the “concept of privacy” is “evolving” under the pressure of new technology, being “redefined” into something vaguer and more metaphysical that it was.
You can’t make those arguments because, obviously enough, the safeguards didn’t work. If they had worked, nothing like this NSA program would have ever seen the light of day. If FISA courts had any real power, if government attorneys had any serious intention of serving the interests of the public, the NSA effort would have been limited to a paper proposal, like thousands of other crazy ideas. (For their own part, the conservative elite have waltzed their way into the dunce corner all by themselves with the argument that national security trumps everything. Memo to NRO, Commentary et al — it doesn’t. It never has.)
Americans know full well what “privacy” is. They know it simply involves being left alone, particularly by those in power. They know that it does not “evolve” without turning into something else completely. Privacy is an aspect of human nature and, like marriage, parenthood, ownership of property, or self-defense, cannot be destroyed or modified by legislation or government activity. Those who attempt to do so are challenging the fountains of the vasty deep, and will be washed away in the attempt.
Involving as it does the NSA, it’s unlikely we will ever learn exactly who was behind this, who gave the orders, and what the precise purpose was. But in a way, that doesn’t matter. We know what the source is, and the rest we can guess.
I think we’re going to find out a lot more before this is over, though. We won’t have to guess.
[Update a while later]
The new Panopticon — the all-seeing eye:
The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers. I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused: after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family. I left the tape on.
This is what it has come to. The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government. The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.
I keep my webcam on my desktop unplugged unless I’m using it, but maybe I should tape my laptop camera. And no, I’ve never trusted Google with my data. But so many people I email with are gmail users, it probably doesn’t matter.
And then there’s this:
No doubt once again there will be a mad scramble in the Capitol to do something – new regulations, new oversight, new attempts to protect civil liberties. But, thanks to Moore’s Law, the technology will have already moved on. Is it too much to ask, just once, that Congress get ahead of this mess before all of those newly-purchased copies of 1984 turn into tour guides? The leaders of many top Silicon Valley companies have besmirched the reputations of their companies (“Do no evil” indeed) and lost the hard-earned trust of their international customers in the last few days – for what? Haul them in before a Senate committee and find out what threats the NSA and other agencies made to make these powerful billionaires give up so much.
Meanwhile, Congress, get ahead of the technology curve for once. You can start by asking about where the data goes from cellphone cameras. Then talk to the GPS folks about the ability to track the location of private phones and use their phone and tablet cameras. Query Google about the future plans for those autonomous camera cars. Get Bill Gates and ask him about what he had to give up to quiet that Microsoft anti-trust case of a decade ago. All may prove dead-ends, but who can now be sure?
Who indeed?
Should be doing a long stint in Club Fed:
Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan; she also is a national security problem, because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.
The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.
The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.
This is the danger of a too-powerful government.
Found on Facebook, and just what I’ve been thinking.
…it’s that we can’t trust these people.
For instance, how hard would it be to search the metadata to find out who attended Tea Party rallies?
[Update late morning]
Hey, gun grabbers? This is why we don’t want you to know what guns we have. If you don’t have a list, we don’t have to worry about you abusing it.
Is this the most politically tone-deaf administration in history?
And do they really think that throwing Donilon under the bus is going to make Benghazi go away?
I feel much more secure now that we have a security advisor who doesn’t know the difference between a terrorist attack and a rambunctious movie review.
[Afternoon update]
“Not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird:
Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain.
He’s being kind, I think.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, per comments here and elsewhere, how can the administration prevent her from testifying on executive privilege when the thing that she will be testifying about occurred when she was working for the State Department?
OK, let me amend that. How can they credibly do so?
Not that that ever slows them down, either, of course. It didn’t with Holder in Fast and Furious.
And then there’s this. Maybe Bob-1 is right in comments (hey, you know, blind squirrels and all) and it’s not Donilon that’s becoming a bus speed bump:
As for birds two and three, I’ll leave it to my PJ colleagues to unpack the implicit antisemitic and anti-Israel nature of the Power appointment; the Irish-born Ms. Power is married to Harvard egghead Cass Sunstein, proving once again that leftists, like rock stars and supermodels, tend to travel in packs and marry each other because they never meet anybody else. But surely Hillary Clinton, who’s clearly now being fitted for the fall guy jacket regarding Benghazi, must be seething.
Keep the corn popper on standby.
That’s a more polite way of describe the location of his noggin than the one I’d use. Only a fool thinks that you can end a war unilaterally.
“They are a civilization whose core has been destroyed.”
OK, so, ignoring the fact that this goes against the president’s reelection narrative, please explain how it ends.