Charles Krauthammer is getting a kick out of Lindsey Graham’s reaction to Dianne Feinstein’s accusation that the CIA has been spying on the Senate.
On FoxNews last night, the columnist said the following:
What I like the best about this is that Lindsey Graham, a Republican, comes upon the brawl, and he says that if true, the Congress should declare war on the CIA.
Interestingly, we haven’t declared war on anybody since Pearl Harbor.
Lindsey comes across a fight and he hands out Molotov cocktails to all the participants.
Ya gotta love that guy.
You can see the video above. Graham has said “This is dangerous to a democracy. Heads should roll, people should go to jail if it’s true,” and that “this is Richard Nixon stuff…”
That is a twist. You’ve got Democrats in the Senate flinging accusations at a Democratic administration, and a Republican eggs them on by saying it’s as bad as Nixon. One gathers that Republicans like watching a fight between Democrats the way schoolboys like seeing a couple of girls come to blows on the playground. (I can see Lindsey yelling down the hall, “Democrat fight!”)
Oh… and apparently Graham is enjoying the fact that Krauthammer is enjoying it. The Krauthammer clip was brought to my attention by Graham’s office.
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I enjoy the irony of Lindsey being worked up over spying on HIM but supporting spying on every other American in the WAR ON TERROR!!!!!
The sooner his grandstanding, camera hogging, war mongering self is gone from the Senate, the better.
Actually, there’s no irony here at all. He’s right to be concerned about this, as is Sen. Feinstein. And I am unaware of him “supporting spying on every other American.”
The relevant quote from Sen. Graham:
“I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.”
Yeah… if you aren’t guilty, why would you be concerned? Just questioning that the process exists must mean you have something to hide.
I agree with him. It’s not about spying on you or me, or even, at this level, on the terrorists for that matter. It’s about looking for patterns that might give us a heads-up on a terrorist plot.
I don’t feel any more spied upon than I did with postal workers seeing the address and return address on the outside of a piece of snail mail. If you DO feel violated by this, there’s probably nothing I can do to make you feel better…
They can go to three levels of relationships between calls. That is a wide swath of innocent people.
And who has been harmed? Surely we’d have anecdotes if any had been…
Are you ABSOLUTELY 100% certain that an innocent person has not been the subject of an investigation as a result of phone data analysis? Remember, this is the same government that built the Obamacare website.
Ya know, this is kind of like the argument some of y’all were having on an earlier post about whether people who make a fortune are virtuous or not, and whether they “owe” anything to the rest of us, etc.
After all these years, we should be able to have these arguments that we’ve had SO many times on autopilot. Or use shorthand, save ourselves a lot of typing. We could assign arguments codes.
Bud could say, “Assertion 14C,” referring to his belief that rich people owe their fortunes to luck,
Then Doug could say, “27G.”
And Bud would come back with, “Oh yeah? Well, I counter that with 3G and a modified 42M.”
Then Silence would jump in with, “As I’ve said before, 13F! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Silly post. If you read the arguments in depth, you will see nuances, parallel applications, and new assertions. The repetition of talking points is sometimes glaring, but that doesn’t diminish the need to continue to refine and reinterpret the rhetoric.
It’s a JOKE.
Lord knows, I’ve written the same arguments over and over again, and will do so many times in the future.
One nice thing, though, about writing for the Web, and having an archive that goes back almost 9 years: We can refer each other, via HTML links, to what we said previously and save ourselves a lot of typing — unless we have some creative new wrinkle to add…
Shorter version of Graham and Feinstein: “Not us, you idiots! You’re supposed to be spying on THEM!”
6 (b)
I KNEW you were going to say that!
Please use argument 22(c) when making this rebuttal. Cite 22(d) if being ironic. Save us all some time.
22(d)
It’s all a fun Democrat vs. Democrat Beltway pie fight to Krauthammer — except that the misconduct being investigated and covered up happened under Bush/Cheney.
Feinstein really was the best friend that the CIA & NSA had in the Senate. This is Jeter turning against the Yankees.
Yep. When the intel community loses her, it’s in trouble.
We didn’t have these problems when Sir Joseph Blaine had charge of the secret funds…
Brenner should be fired, now! Of course he’s a Bush holdover. Serves Obama right. All the Bush holdovers have turned into disasters: Petraeus, Gates and now this guy. I just couldn’t resist a bit of partisan Bush bashing.
Obama could lose my support over this issue if he doesn’t take swift and decisive action. This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.
Graham’s outrage falls into the category of “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” The “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” justification for potentially unprecedented domestic surveillance has come around to bite some of these Senators in the tuchus.
The “I’m not talking to terrorists, so no worries” line shows a fundamental misunderstanding of civil liberties in a society that wishes to continue to be a liberal democracy, because the individual citizen is not the one who will decide whether or not the people to whom he is speaking are terrorists, or connected to terrorists, or connected to people who are connected to people who are connected to people who are individuals “of interest” to the government, etc. The individual is not the one who will decide that he or she has “done nothing wrong.”
I’m not highly worried about the NSA phone record surveillance as long as the “spying” only looks at patterns, not content. What is troubling is the “no worries for me, I’m clean” attitude that Graham exudes. Just who might be a terrorist depends heavily on the eye of “the decider,” and has ranged from Martin Luther King to Foreign press members, Woody Guthrey, and a presidential “enemies list.” Without monitoring and outing by a private group like the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Jewish Anti-defamation League, many groups planning great harm might be overlooked by government watchmen (eg Timothy McVeigh). Your terrorist might, indeed be my hero. What is most needed, I believe is strict oversight by a proper judicial body (not legislative – they leak and are highly partisan ala Graham) with clear authority and respect for needed secrecy.