Obama’s Bill Clinton Moment: ‘We Don’t Have a Domestic Spying Program’ the Atlantic
“We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.” - President Obama
President Barack Obama’s national security team acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that, when investigating one suspected terrorist, it can read and store the phone records of millions of Americans.
Since it was revealed recently that the National Security Agency puts the phone records of every American into a database, the Obama administration has assured the nation that such records are rarely searched and, when they are, officials target only suspected international terrorists. - AP
Like Clinton’s famous sidestep — on which you can read Tim Noah here — this is clever. It’s not false if you use the words in a certain way and only in that way: If spying is narrowly construed to mean, say, warrantless wiretaps on Americans, then it’s apparently true that there’s no domestic spying program. But it’s also not really true, and it suggests a sort of smirking contempt on the president’s part for his interlocutors, and citizens.
Heywood - He has been proven to be, many times now, so fundementally dishonest on this subject that he has lost all credibility here. His statement that he would “consider” changes to the FISA Court were widely seen as a joke. The proof will be that congress will fail to pass any of his proposed reforms of the Patriot Act because they will not be seen as addressing any of the concerns. And so, will not give any politican who votes for them political cover.
The political dynamics - the majority of Dems won’t back these sham proposals and the majority of the GOP will not beause they do not want to give him a win.
The Patriot will fail to be renwed to next time it comes up.
