Thursday, April 01, 2010

Quote of the day

"That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush's NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA). That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense. The law really does say that. Just click on that link and you'll see. It's been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law -- committed felonies -- in spying on Americans without warrants. Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal. If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing. But since we're not such a country, it isn't and it doesn't." - Glenn Greenwald

And while extremists go off into the woods and prepare to kill law enforcement officers in order to spark a revolution to restore America to a fictional past status as a Christian republic and defend it from the Constitution trampling of the anti-Christ serving Obama administration, you hear generally nothing about this sort of actual criminal Constitution trampling from the likes of Glenn Beck who has been telling his audience that a potential anti-Christ, anti-Christian totalitarian has been trampling on the Constitution (which supposedly established America as a Christian republic) because he wants to decrease the number of Americans without health insurance.

As Greenwald notes, the Obama administration attempted to invoke state secrets to prevent the court from ruling on the Bush administration's criminal program; yet that's the sort of thing that doesn't seem to bother the Beck's or Hannity's of the world: their conception of "tyranny" is the top marginal tax rate going up a few percentage points or the EPA preventing some corporation from dumping toxic waste into the local water.

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