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Bush Puts Telecoms Ahead of Citizens
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC
updated 3:06 p.m. PT, Fri., Feb. 1, 2008
In a Presidency of hypocrisy; an Administration of exploitation; a labyrinth of leadership, in which every vital fact is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma hidden under a claim of executive privilege supervised by an idiot, this one, is surprisingly easy.
President Bush has put protecting the Telecom giants from the laws ahead of protecting you from the terrorists.
He has demanded an extension of the FYCA law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but only an extension that includes retroactive immunity for the Telecoms who helped him spy on you.
Congress has given him, and he has signed, a 15-day extension, which simply kicks the time bomb down the field, and has changed nothing of his insipid rhetoric, in which he portrays the Democrats as 'soft on terror' and getting in the way of his Superhuman efforts to protect the nation when, in fact and with bitter irony, if anybody is 'soft on terror' here it is Mr. Bush.
In the State of the Union Address, Sir, you told Congress, "if you do not act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats would be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger."
Yet you are willing to weaken that ability!
You will subject us, your citizens, to that greater danger.
This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough even for you to understand: If Congress approves a new FYCA act without telecom immunity and sends it to your desk and you veto it, you, by your own terms and your own definitions, you will have just sided with the terrorists.
You got to have this law, or we're all going to die. But you might veto this law!
It's bad enough, Sir, that you are demanding an ex post facto law which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans, under the flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.
But when you then demanded again, during the State of the Union address, that Congress retroactively clear the Verizons and the AT&T's, you wouldn't even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared!
"The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America."
Believed?
Don't you know?
Does the endless hair-splitting of your presidential fine print, extend even here?
If you, Sir, are asking Congress, and us, to join you in this shameless, breathless, literal, textbook example of fascism; the merged efforts of government and corporations who answer to no government, you still don't have the guts to even say the telecom companies did assist you, in your efforts?
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Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything?
Even the stuff you claim to believe in?
Silly me.
Of course Mr. Bush is going to say "believed."
CONTINUED
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