Saturday, May 13, 2006

Will they ever learn?

The latest uproar being aimed at the Bush administration is once more over them doing their job. Not only their job, but a job Americans overwhelmingly approve of (if 51% is a majority, 68% is overwhelming) I'm typing about, of course, the NSA phone number database "scandal" which democrats are once more "deeply concerned" through "righteously outraged" over. But it seems to me, the dems haven't been doing their job or their homework very well. This story is not new at all, in fact as Dafydd at Big Lizards points out it is about 5 months old first being published in the New York Times. I find it an interesting parallel that the Danish mohammed cartoons had also been circulating for 5 months before anyone decided to try to use them for political gain. Is this some sort of gestation period for manipulators? A spin-doctor window of timing?

What is bizarre to me is that an entire industry and large group of political affiliations are so ignorant of the times we live in that they actually believe and act on a daily basis as if no one will recognize or point out the obvious blunder of their attempts at controlling opinion. I've had acquaintances who I never even knew were into blogs and the web as information sources start to point out things to me during our conversations that I hadn't even heard yet. Surely the big news organizations and our democratic senators and representatives are capable of being more savvy than this?

So far in all my reading and watching television I haven't seen a thing that either worries me or strikes me as illegal. I can readily go out and buy all sorts of databases containing a myriad of information about potential customers and their transaction habits. What the NSA has done in mining our phone records for terrorist patterns is not only sensible, in the least, it is also a bit overdue. That the democrats will try to polarize and terrify the American public with Orwellian boogy-men prior to an election is not only to be expected it is another example of how desperate they are. So desperate that they would rather endanger this country than get behind it in our efforts to defeat an enemy which wants all of us dead.

1 comment:

Rae Ann said...

You are absolutely right! And I heard last week that Tony Blair said that if they had been looking for phone patterns like that they probably would have prevented their terrorist attack last summer.

And about our 'leaders' not being aware of things, I still can't believe that supposedly no one, from the local level up, could see the New Orleans disaster coming. I recall watching a show either on the History Channel or maybe Discovery or the Weather Channel about how vulnerable New Orleans was to a hurricane. And that was within a year before Katrina. They say that TV is bad, but sometimes those of us who watch it a lot are more informed than the 'leadership'.