Amphibian Cookery & The Dogshit Theory
It is astonishing to me that a sitting head of state of an allegedly democratic country can not only deliberately and publicly break the law, but brag about it, declare he has untramelled executive authority and then pile brazenness on top of impunity by refusing to submit to question by a legitimate authority – if that sounds very much like a coup d’etat in progress to me, an overseas blogger, why can’t the US media see it?
Several people have made the apt comparison of the American voting public and media to the frog in in slowly-heating water, who doesn’t realise it’s being boiled alive by degrees.
I prefer the dogshit theory. The Us got sold a pup. They thought they were getting a cute well-trained pedigree darling, but what they got is a sneaky incontinent mutt.
The foetid turds appear on the rug with monotonous regularity – spying, Iraq, Katrina, and on and on – the faeces are there, all right, and smelling to high heaven – but they are, apparently, invisible. The public just don’t want to see them – because that would mean admitting their own dumb culpability in buying the leaky pooch in the first place. Easier to pull the rug over the mess, spray it with Glade and pretend.
‘What’s that smell? ” “Oh, that? It’s nothing. Have you seen Lindsay Lohan’s naked pics online?”
If there’s anything the US public appears convinced of, it’s that they should be never have to pay the inevitable price for any stupid thing they’ve done. That’s for the little people.
Much more fun to excoriate Denmark, however justifiably, for being bigoted ‘Old Europe’. It’s vastly more satisfying and makes one feel incredibly superior to bitch about the neighbours – not only that it diverts the attention from the pile of dog-turd on the carpet and who’s going to have to clean it up.
Here’s another big pile of shit. The Washington Post:
“The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, “wash out” most of the leads within days or weeks.The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush’s circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program’s lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged “reasonable” if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation’s second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers “have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.” Other officials, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the prevalence of false leads is especially pronounced when U.S. citizens or residents are surveilled. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that “terrorist . . . operatives inside our country,” as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping. “
UPDATE: Raw Story reports that Cheney pushed for this back in the Ford administration…
