Missing the point

One of my leftover vices from my years as a Republican apologist is that I'll still listen to "conservative" talk radio from time to time. Today I heard a couple of shows where downplaying the telephone database story was the main mission.

One played up the fact that the U.S. gummint is only collecting the numbers we've dialed; it's not like they've been actually listening in on all of us. And anyway, it apparently turns out that the New York Times reported this exact same information last Dec. 24 (when everyone's first impulse, of course, is to read every article in every newspaper), so this is OLD NEWS! WHERE YA BEEN?

The other berated Democratic critics of the Bush administration because it turns out the database was collected under the auspices of the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and signed by a Democrat president. Bernie Sanders and Teddy Kennedy are HYPOCRITES - they VOTED for this law! Hillary Clinton is a HYPOCRITE - her husband SIGNED it! Why are they complaining now? It must be OK for a Republican administration to do it, because a Democrat administration passed the law authorizing it.

Lost in all of the rhetoric was the simple question: Is it right to compile a huge database of information - "the largest database ever assembled in the world" - about innocent people's private conversations in order to sift through it to find a handful of bad guys? Of course it's not right. And even if it's true that today you're only "looking for bad guys," tomorrow you're using it as an excuse to invade our privacy in some less innocent way. Today the database is in the hands of "good Republicans," but after the election it will belong to the "evil Democrats," and who knows what THEY will do with it?

Yep, lost in all the rhetoric was a simple fact: The assault on our liberty is a bipartisan effort, and don't let all the yabbering to the contrary fool ya.