Glenn Greenwald has another outstanding post up today. This one is about the utter failure of our media, either television broadcasters or print journalists, to simply tell the truth about why Democrats, progressives and liberals (and, really, anyone concerned with the loss of our civil liberties) oppose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap programs. Instead, most “journalists” (and yes, I highlight that term to mock them) continue to regurgitate Republican Talking Points which are flat out lies:
Put another way, the Republicans will attempt to exploit this debate by advancing two factually false claims:
Falsehood # 1: the debate is about whether the President can eavesdrop on Al Qaeda and other terrorists;
Falsehood # 2: “most Americans” support warrantless eavesdropping.
Glenn generously calls these talking points “falsehoods”, a more genteel word than I would favor. I will employ what seems to me a more descriptive, if more acerbic and less polite, nomenclature. To me these are not merely “falsehoods”, the are, frankly, BIG FUCKING REPUBLICAN LIES. And whether through indolence, negligence or premeditation the mainstream media in our country keeps repeating these BIG FUCKING LIES as if they were true.
A bill to clarify the legality of the NSA’s wiretapping without court warrants will also force Democrats to choose between a liberal base that believes the program is an unconstitutional breach of civil rights and a majority of Americans who back the effort.
Note that both of these “falsehoods” are stated in this Washington Post story by Jonathan Weisman, as fact: explicitly the lie that most Americans back Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping, and, implicitly, the one that Democrats care more about what their “liberal base wants” than defending America from terrorists.
Well, these BIG FUCKING REPUBLICAN LIES are not true, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ll let Glenn explain why they are not true (because he’s more erudite and eloquent then I am, frankly) below the fold:
First up, Glenn on the BIG FUCKING REPUBLICAN LIE (hereafter “BFRL” for short) that most Americans support the President’s warrantless spying programs:
That single paragraph is packed with misconceptions, but the most significant one is the claim that “a majority of Americans” — in contrast to the Democrats’ “liberal base” — “back” warrantless eavesdropping.
How does the Post reconcile this statement with this fact, reported on August 17 by CNN:
Opinion polls suggest the U.S. public has been divided on the NSA program. A CNN poll conducted by Opinion Research Corp. on May 16-17 found that 50 percent of the respondents believe the program was “wrong,” while 44 percent believe it was “right.”
Or with this poll (“voters say 55 – 42 percent that the government should get court orders for this surveillance”), or with this one (“47 percent said [warrantless eavesdropping] was right and 50 percent called it wrong”), or with this one (“49 percent of respondents said the president had definitely or probably broken the law by authorizing the wiretaps and 47 percent said he probably or definitely had not”), or with this one (pluralities in 37 out of 50 states believe it is “clear that Bush broke the law”), or with this one (“A majority of voters want Congress to ‘demand that the warrantless eavesdropping be stopped because it is illegal’”). And all of that was before a federal judge ruled that warrantless eavesdropping violates both the criminal law and the U.S. Constitution.
So much for BFRL #1. Maybe the Washington Post and Mr. Weisman don’t allow their reporters to use Google, and so Mr. Weisman was simply unaware of these poll results. News organizations have been cutting back on all sorts of things these days so I suppose it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that such an edict might have been issued to WaPo’s reporters and editors. Or maybe they believe they can divine the mood of the American public better than any pollster, but if that’s the case they ought to say they’re pulling these so-called facts out of their collective ass so we, as their readers, can assess the value of their source for such pronouncements.
Now for BFRL #2, the one that claims the debate between Democrats and Republicans is over whether the President should be permitted to spy on terrorists at all, when, in fact, the debate is over whether Bush should be allowed to break the law and the Constitution. Glenn, once again:
If I had one wish, it would be for journalists everywhere to ingest this one extremely simple, undeniable fact — FISA, as written, allows the President to “listen in when Osama bin Laden is calling.” Under the law as it has existed for 28 years, “if al Qaeda is calling into the United States [the President can] know why they’re calling.” The “Terrorist Surveillance Program” doesn’t give the President the power to listen in on those calls because he already has that power under FISA.
The difference between FISA and the warrantless eavesdropping program is not about whether the President can eavesdrop on terrorists. He can eavesdrop on all of the terrorists he wants under FISA as it is written. What is being debated — the only difference — is whether he should be able to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans with judicial oversight (as all Presidents have done for the last 30 years) or whether he can eavesdrop on Americans in secret, without oversight (which led to severe abuses of the eavesdropping powers in the four decades prior to FISA). That is what is being decided, not whether he can eavesdrop on terrorists.
In short, dear journalists, big time columnists, broadcasters, opinion makers, pundits and talking heads extraordinaire, do us all a favor. Stop peddling the BIG FUCKING REPUBLICAN LIES that your sources at the White House keep pushing on you, and do your homework.
In shorter, TELL THE BLOODY FUCKING TRUTH FOR ONCE, GODDAMMIT!
Really, it shouldn’t be this hard. Oh, and pardon me for being so “uncivil”, but if you JACKASS STENOGRAPHERS IN THE MEDIA would just do your job, it would make it oh so much easier for me to adopt a more civilized and elevated tone when addressing you.
Republican talking points on NSA scandal