--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > In a message dated 8/20/06 10:45:17 P.M. Central Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > Well, yeah, but at least he would be obeying the law.... > > You don't know that he isn't. You have the opinion of one very > liberal judge playing politics with the matter.
Oh, wait, I thought it was *liberals* who were going to be accusing judges of playing politics, and here it's the right-winger! Actually, of course, there's a significant bunch of legal experts, not all of them liberals by any means, who believe he's breaking the law. Even some who are among the few real conservatives left (you know, the ones who are big on civil liberties). Former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, for instance, writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution back in December of last year: President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to "monitor" phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to "detect" improper communications. This example of presidential phrase parsing was followed quickly by the president's press secretary, Scott McLellan, dead-panning to reporters that when Bush said a couple of years ago that he would never allow the NSA to monitor Americans without a court order, what he really meant was something different than what he actually said. . . By using the White House counsel's office to bury investigators in a sea of motions, pleadings and memoranda, an administration can drag out an investigation to the point of exhaustion. By the time the investigation actually slogs through this legal maze to bring real charges or issue a report, the courts, public and media are so sick and tired of hearing about it that the final charges fall stillborn from the press. A critical component of White House Scandal Defense 101 is rallying the partisan base. This keeps approval ratings in territory where the wheels don't start falling off. The way to achieve this goal is you go negative and you don't let up. If you're always attacking your accusers, the debate becomes one of Democrat vs. Republican, rather than right vs. wrong. Anyone who questions the legality of the decision to wiretap thousands of Americans unlawfully is attacked, as either an enabler of terrorists or a bitter partisan trying to distract a president at war. http://tinyurl.com/fyb8g To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
