Let us assume just for the sake of argument that the Republican party’s sudden interest in protecting the privacy of Americans isn’t just a political gimmick. This is after all a political party that has time and again showed that they would be willing to sell their own grandmothers and any serious proposal that comes from this entity should be viewed with extreme skepticism. But the demographics are rapidly changing and the pandering to racists, religious fanatics, cranks and outright idiots is increasingly becoming not only a recipe for losing elections but for becoming a shrinking, southern based permanent minority that can only survive by changing the laws to suppress voting and that can't last forever. The culture wars are over or to put it more succinctly they have shifted over to the Democrats with their ongoing concealment of the moral bankruptcy of their own party by focusing on using the government to address the grievances of many identity based groups with crusades for the legalization of same sex marriage and preserving women’s reproductive rights. The Republicans reliably ruled on these very issues and used them to muster the loyal shocktroops come election day but times change – we should all be very happy that the GOP lost the culture wars because they provided a cover to avoid addressing very real and serious issues and created a political vacuum that was rapidly filled by corruption.
With the announcement that Republican National Committee (RNC) has adopted a resolution to investigate the out of control and unconstitutional NSA programs, formally titled “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program” the party has finally taken a big step back towards relevance. That is if it is not just playing politics which it usually is with this group and it is an interesting bit of hypocrisy that none of these programs which were being used during the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration and did not elicit any such consideration. Barack Obama did inherit the NSA Stasi but instead of bringing about reforms and the promised “transparency” he doubled-down, just gave a major speech defending the ongoing Orwellian operations and his administration is denouncing Thursday’s report by the government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It was also reported by beltway ‘Inside Baseball’ rag Politico that the administration also believed that the surveillance review report produced by Obama's own hand picked panel was too – gasp –“liberal” and sided with guardians of the NSA illegal surveillance programs.
The Politico piece, citing University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone one of the five members of the The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology that recommended changes to NSA programs that Obama is going to ignore states:
A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”
“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.
Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”
So once again Obama the narcissist, ever conscious of his precious legacy has chosen political calculus over doing what is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of the American people. Having already sold out to Wall Street gamblers who need $85 billion dollars a month pumped into their gambling casinos just to stave off another too big to fail megabank implosion, to the parasitical insurance industry with the corporate giveaway that is Obamacare, ending the wars in a real manner not concealed by smoke and mirrors and now the NSA the man is every bit the criminal that Bush ever was. Now he and his Democratic party hacks have done the exact one thing that any savvy politician, businessperson and warrior would never do - give your enemy the knife with which they will cut your own throat. These oppressive big government surveillance programs are now owned by Obama and if the GOP is serious in opposing them they would now have the most ass-kicking club in the bag going into the 2014 and 2016 elections.
I remain a skeptic on all of this though, especially when considering that the GOP is the party of Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee,Sarah Palin and Reince Priebus and that it contains some of the biggest warmongers on the planet, notably bloodthirsty Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. RNC opposition to the NSA Stasi will also run afoul of the two most prominent television friendly shills for the fascist surveillance state in Representatives Peter King and Mike Rogers so this is going to be quite an interesting show and can only accelerate the ongoing inner party conflict between libertarians such as Rand Paul and Justin Amash and the corrupt warmongering establishment that now is interchangeable with the Obama regime.
I recently wrote a post citing a Financial Times story on the rise of libertarian ideals with younger Americans who are turned off by the culture wars of old and business as usual. Now a smart political party with an eye on the future would use this opportunity to capitalize on American anger at the NSA excesses, purge the corrupt establishment and begin to run solely on reinstating the rule of law as well as beginning to restore the Constitution. Whether the GOP is that smart remains to be seen but a major party opposing the post September 11, 2001 doppelganger of what used to be at least theoretically a free country could provide just the type of vehicle that Americans need to roll back the National Security State.
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