Update: Whose side are they on?
I spent some time on Huffpuff again tonight enjoying my daily rants with anti-Bush moonbats barking over the latest NSA counterterrorism scandal. Word of advice: if you're bored and want some cheep comedic entertainment, liberal blogs are the way to go.But seriously, I continued to read over and over these idiots calling Bush a liar, a fascist, a Nazi and so on. But not one of these individuals would accept the truth of this current "baggage" scandal by the USA Today.
So I sat down to watch Hannity & Colmes, where Sean Hannity and Alam Colmes were talking with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Newt was basically saying he would support the NSA on any counterterrorism plan, but felt the Bush Administration had been very confusing with their response to this and other NSA issues.
It was at that point that Sean Hannity said one of the most brilliant things about all this political posturing. I looked for the transcript online but couldn't find it yet, so I'll do my best to paraphrase Sean's points.
Sean basically stated that this entire data mining program has been discussed out of context by virtually every media agency out there. He even pointed out that both Newt and Alan used the words "wiretapping" while discussing it when in fact, this current scandal was about data mining. Learn more about data mining. As Hannity said, this program only looks at calling trends. It doesn't look at names, addresses or anything else. And it certainly does not "wiretap" or "record" calls.
Sean then asked Alan and Newt why this NSA program was suddenly a big deal, when it was Bill Clinton who introduced us to Eschelon and Carnivore, a far more intrusive spy program. Why is this suddenly a hot button topic, when no one on Capital Hill had any issues with E&C. As Sean pointed out, did it bother them back then to have email, website visitations, chatroom content and telephone calls monitored? And we're not just talking about international calls here, but domestic calls between two ordinary American citizens. Keeping in mind, this was pre-9/11 days when Clinton was quite busy ignoring growing terrorist threats.
And so I sat there watching Sean bring this up and neither Alan or Newt could say a thing. Sean Hannity had just blown this entire scandal into liberal smithereens and left nothing but crickets in his wake.