Warlord
06-01-2013, 09:19 AM
Josh Marshall at TPM reduced to nothing more than a regime stenographer praising Obama's pick to head the FBI - who was in charge of an NSA eavesdropping program he previously denounced.
Nothing like liberal hypocrisy for the Jay Carney's among the press.
I wonder if the NYT will lavish praise on this selection considering they broke the original NSA story?
One of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration (which is really saying something) began on December 16, 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all). That was when the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were finally allowed to reveal what they had learned more than a year earlier: namely, that President Bush, in 2002, had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of US citizens without first obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by 30-year-old criminal law. For the next three years, they reported, the NSA "monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants." The two NYT reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for that story.
To say that progressives and liberals bellowed sustained outrage over that revelation is to understate the case
...
Comey will run the FBI alongside Obama's chief of the CIA, John Brennan, who spent the Bush years advocating (http://www.salon.com/2008/11/16/brennan/) multiple torture techniques and rendition. The Agent of Change reaches deep into the bowels of the Bush National Security State and empowers them to run two of the most powerful agencies. Then again, the Bush NSA program is hardly controversial in the Age of Obama: it was Obama who first voted to immunize the telecoms from all legal liability for their illegal participation in that program, then the Obama DOJ succeeded in having all lawsuits over that program dismissed on secrecy and immunity grounds, and then Obama himself succeeded in first enacting and then renewing the law that legalized (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinstein-obama-democrats-eavesdropping) most aspects of that Bush NSA eavesdropping program.
What was once deemed radical is now normal. Bush officials who formally authorized programs once depicted by progressives as radical and criminal are now heralded by those same progressives as Champions of the Constitution. The politician elected on a pledge of Change and Restoration of Our Values now routinely empowers exactly those Washington officials who championed the policies against which he railed. It's one thing to watch Obama shield and protect all Bush officials who enabled this illegal warrantless domestic surveillance scheme. It's quite another to watch him put in charge of the FBI the very official whose signature deemed it to be legal.
Full thing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/james-comey-fbi-bush-nsa
Nothing like liberal hypocrisy for the Jay Carney's among the press.
I wonder if the NYT will lavish praise on this selection considering they broke the original NSA story?
One of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration (which is really saying something) began on December 16, 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all). That was when the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were finally allowed to reveal what they had learned more than a year earlier: namely, that President Bush, in 2002, had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of US citizens without first obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by 30-year-old criminal law. For the next three years, they reported, the NSA "monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants." The two NYT reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for that story.
To say that progressives and liberals bellowed sustained outrage over that revelation is to understate the case
...
Comey will run the FBI alongside Obama's chief of the CIA, John Brennan, who spent the Bush years advocating (http://www.salon.com/2008/11/16/brennan/) multiple torture techniques and rendition. The Agent of Change reaches deep into the bowels of the Bush National Security State and empowers them to run two of the most powerful agencies. Then again, the Bush NSA program is hardly controversial in the Age of Obama: it was Obama who first voted to immunize the telecoms from all legal liability for their illegal participation in that program, then the Obama DOJ succeeded in having all lawsuits over that program dismissed on secrecy and immunity grounds, and then Obama himself succeeded in first enacting and then renewing the law that legalized (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinstein-obama-democrats-eavesdropping) most aspects of that Bush NSA eavesdropping program.
What was once deemed radical is now normal. Bush officials who formally authorized programs once depicted by progressives as radical and criminal are now heralded by those same progressives as Champions of the Constitution. The politician elected on a pledge of Change and Restoration of Our Values now routinely empowers exactly those Washington officials who championed the policies against which he railed. It's one thing to watch Obama shield and protect all Bush officials who enabled this illegal warrantless domestic surveillance scheme. It's quite another to watch him put in charge of the FBI the very official whose signature deemed it to be legal.
Full thing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/james-comey-fbi-bush-nsa