I'm Juvenile

That works for me.
Mr. Taylor , from the article below was made aware of my little late night rant and relayed his opinion to someone who shall remain nameless at this time.

I will have to agree it is not refined in anyway and it does actually make his point, I DO get a visceral reaction to having my rights and liberties trampled in an unconstitutional power grab by what I consider to be a criminal administration. He does have that point correct.

I am certainly capable of expressing my thoughts without resorting to expletives and personal attacks, I just was not in the mood to do so, now I am.

Going back to his original quote, I will refresh that here;

"[T]he prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists. This despite the paucity of evidence that any innocent person anywhere has been seriously harmed in recent decades by governmental abuse of wiretapping, surveillance, or data mining.

On these and similar issues, Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses — and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I’m betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter".

Let me start at the beginning and point out what I consider to be the faults with this comment.

First we have this statement,

"[T]he prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists."

I am reminded of the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin,


"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

There were already guidelines in place concerning the use of wiretaps and President Bush and his advisors unilaterally decided that they were too restrictive and went ahead and started wiretapping everybody without the oversite of the FISA court, which by the way, had only ever turned down five requests for wiretaps in twenty five years .
The government, under FISA, could actually wiretap anyone they wanted for Seventy two hours before they had to purge that information or get a warrant.

Now, under Bush, they were not only retaining this information but they had other programs data mining everyday people in the United States of America.
All cell phone conversations, e-mails and other electronic information was now being swept up surreptitiously and sent through a computer system trying to glean information just for general purposes.

As I recall, the Fourth amendment of the Constitution directly states that we the people, are to remain secure in our homes and papers and there must be a warrant issued with probable cause for there to be any action by the government.

This is the very thing that causes me distress with the thought process of our Mr. Taylor.

Where is the probable cause for the government to listen in on the phone call of your Aunt Millie?
There isn't one and he knows it.
But it is for our safety he points out.
I refer back to the Franklin quote.
This WAS a free country.
We dealt with threats in a timely and legal manner.


As for Obama kicking the Far left gently in the teeth, I would remind Mr. Taylor that a great deal of Mr. Obamas supporters are actually progressives and Liberals, that would be the Far left he is talking about.
That would put Mr. Taylor on the far Right. That would be the party that just got massively repudiated after eight years of disasterous policy.

Mr. Taylor seems to think that he is still somehow in the majority and that President elect Obama should actually pay attention to what he is saying.

I find this to be hubristic in the extreme.

As for his last attempt to justify his position, he claims that if President elect Obama does not continue the failed policy of the Bush administration, it will somehow weaken our defense.

I still do not see what Aunt Millie's conversations have to do with protecting our interests here and abroad.

Finally, this next bit causes me to wonder what Mr. Taylor sees that I don't,

"Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses..."

He seems to be counter pointing his opening statement.

If President Bush has been abusing his Executive powers, how is it that it is necessary for us to continue them?

No, I will stick with my opinion that Mr. Taylor is catapulting the propaganda as it were and restate my extreme antipathy for his message.
President Bush and his illegal wiretap programs are just that, illegal.
He has not stopped them, he has just modified them.

I do not feel safer because of these programs and if you want to keep bringing up how we have not been attacked here in the Continental United States since September Eleventh, Two Thousand and One,I will continue to point out that we should not have been attacked even then if President Bush had taken the warnings he was given beforehand, under the old systems, seriously.
The Decider is ultimately to blame for that, he had plenty of warning and ignored it.