The Real Headline

The past couple of days has given us headlines like “White House Takes Heat Over Shooting Disclosure” (ABC News). But I see that headline and read “White House has Cheney Shoot a Guy to Take the Heat off of Them for the Whole Orwell Thing”.

Yeah, call me paranoid, but would that not be good strategy? The wiretapping story is now at #12 on Google News’ US news section. Another interesting note – four of the top twelve stories on the US news section are about the White House getting in trouble.

• We have always been at war with Eurasia… silly

  You are just paranoid. And, if it was to “wag the dog” it is not the wiretapping thing they are ducking from. Iraq and Afghanistan and the economy are weighing on the public much more then the wiretapping thing. Honestly, I think most thought they have always tapped communications where one end was foreign; I know that is what I had assumed. Not that I am advocating or disadvocating the practice, it is just something I had assumed was already status quo. I think my position is that they should be able to do what it sounds like they have been doing, but the authority should not be a dictum of the White House. There need to be a few other branches of government in on the practice. If our current “search warrant” process is too cumbersome because of bureaucracy, then fix that, but we still need someone independent to review and allow it.

• A few comments here…
  – OK, so I doubt that this was some “intentional” shooting to draw attention away from other things. But intentional or not, they are probably really glad that it happened. I mean, the media seems to have dropped everything else just because they are offended. Does the average American give more of a shit that we were forced to wait 18 hours to find out about a Vice Presidential hunting accident, or do we care more about the war in Iraq and a presidential power grab? The media is doing us a disservice here…
  – As for the wiretapping thing…again, the media is doing us a disservice, as are our senators. Honestly, I have been a bit surprised about how much they went after Gonzalez in the hearings recently. But, they are framing the question wrong, with the advantage going to the president. As our good friend “AnarchyX” said over on EA, the question shouldn’t be “Should we be doing wiretapping?”. That is another question for another day. We already have a system in place, a system which has worked quite well, to conduct these wiretaps when the need for them is evidently there. But anyway, that is essentially what you were saying…involvement by the judiciary by using FISA for wiretaps, and involvement of the legislature by going to them if for some reason FISA wasn’t good enough.