It was revealed in 2005 that President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to engage in a "warrantless wiretapping" program years earlier. Not only was this contrary to the NSA's charter, it violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which specifically outlawed in the eavesdropping of foreigners in the United States without a warrant and listening in on American citizens anywhere in the world. It was easily the clearest example of an impeachable act since at least Iran-Contra, and perhaps even Watergate.
Republicans responded to this revealation with a truly awesome parade of half-truths and outright lies.
First, they reminded us that the President is the Commander-in-Chief, and therefore able to do anything he wants in wartime. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that permits the Executive Branch to violate the expressed will of the Legislative Branch, whether the country is at war or not. He cannot, for example, unilaterally increases taxes or shift domestic program spending to the military to fund a war. Before this year, it was generally accepted that the President could not kill an American citizen outside of direct combat in the absence of some sort of a trial.
Furthermore, Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution demands that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There is no "wartime exception" clause, nor does this section tend to support the ridiculous "Unitary Executive Theory," which even the GOP stopped giving lip service to when it invoked the War Powers Act against Obama earlier this year.
Bush's defenders tried to suggest that the program could only surveil Americans who were in direct contact with suspected terrorists, which deliberably ignores that this is not how the program works. The NSA physically installed "taps" on the fiber optic trunklines where they come onto American shores from the sea. This means that it has to monitor all electionic communications to find the few that they're interested in. The technical capability to eavesdrop on everyone at all times is the entire point of the system, otherwise it doesn't work at all. As was the case with the USA Patriot Act, which is almost never used in terrorism investigations, the NSA could very possibly become a branch of domestic law enforcement, destroying the Fourth Amendment forever.
Republicans also seem to have forgotten that Watergate itself grew from President Nixon's use of the supposed Commander-in-Chief power during wartime. The White House Plumbers were created by the Executive Office of the President to investigate the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in ways that the FBI could not. Prior to the forced entry into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the Plumbers broke into the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg's physchatrist, an act that formed part of the Abuse of Power Article of Impeachment against Nixon. And the Ellsberg break-in was something that Nixon pointedly never denied authorizing. He said that he didn't remember doing so, but would have.
At least in theory, if you support the broad application of the Commander-in-Chief power the way modern Republicans want you to, you would have to support not only the Plumbers unit, but the abuse of the IRS in investigating and harassing war critics by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, if only because "When the president does it, it is not illegal."
But God help you if the government feels you up at the airport! No government should be allowed to touch your junk just because you might hijack a 767 and fly it into a highrise building in some nearby metropolis and you refuse to go into the full-body scanners that the Republicans themselves bought! Contrary to the orignialist sentiment of the GOP, you apparently have an unenumerated right to fly to Tampa for spring break to get felt up without getting felt up before getting there. But they can tap into your cell phone without a court order if your travel agent is sorta Arab sounding.
Canada's Conservative Government has taken this expansive view of intrusive government power to its bosom with the introduction of Bill C-30 by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. C-30 allows not only for warrantless online searches of personal information, it also compels Internet Service Providers to create an electronic back door that allows the police to do pretty much whatever they want, again without a warrant.
This overlooks the fact that Canadian cops can already do pretty much whatever they want without a warrant. While there is an "exlusionary rule" in our law prohibiting the use of illegally obtained evidence, the courts only rarely apply it. The courts - including even the Supreme Court of Canada - have repeatedly ruled that excluding such evidence would "bring the administration of justice into disrepute. I would argue that allowing the evidence brings the administration of justice into disrepute because it means that justice is only rarely administred unto the police when fundamental constitutional guarantees of the citizenry are breached. But I'll concede that I'm a pretty weird guy that way, and probably in the tiny minority of Canadians who gives a shit about such things.
Of course, the cops are saying that they support C-30 but that shouldn't surprise anyone. Police officers are like anyone else. If they're offered a tool that makes their job easier, they'd be foolish not to take it. But while child pornography is pretty bad, the police cannot provide a single example of an investigation that was curtailed by the inability to get a warrant. Not one in the entire country. On the other hand, establishing probable cause is a mighty big pain in the ass and has been known to cut into donut breaks.
The police also aren't famous for believing that when government power expands at the expense of fundamental individual liberty, fundamental individual liberty effectively ceases to exist. Well, I suppose that they might believe that, but there's no evidence to suggest that they care. Besides, being on the side of the cops hardly mattered to the Tories when it came to the long-gun registry, now did it? And I supported the Tories on that, even though I don't care much about guns one way or the other.
Towes introduced the measure saying that it is being introduced to combat child pornography, although it is barely mentioned in the legislation outside of its title. Toews further said in the House of Commons that opponents of this draconian and unconstitutional expansion of state power against the individual were "with the child pornographers."
This isn't the first time that the Conservatives went to the kiddie porn well to smear their opponents. During the 2004 campaign, the Tories issued a press release titled "Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography?" For my foreign readers, Paul Martin was then the Prime Minister of Canada. Not only did then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper not denounce the release (even after the campaign withdrew it), he doubled down on the attack. This is widely seen as one of the things that cost Harper that election.
I've come to understand that that most folks don't like being equated with something as vile as child pornography by hack politicians just because they oppose their mouth-breathing agenda. They just don't seem to cotton to it. Not only because it's morally offensive and borderline libelous, but because it's an amateurish rhetorical trick and intellectually insulting.
However, if you're a prominent politician - especially a Cabinet minister - and you absolutely insist on deameaning your own office by calling your opponents pedophiles, you had better fucking well be as pure as the driven snow because a new day is dawning, especially on Twitter.
First, C-30 itself was reduced to an object of ridicule by the meme #TellVicEverything, which absolutely devestated the bill and virtually guaranteed that it wouldn't be passed as currently written. Serious legislation cannot be taken seriously when a good chunk of the country, particularly the younger and more technologically savvy chunk, has reduced it to a great puncline.
Then libertarian-leaning conservatives - among them, many of Harper's own backbenchers - piled on and undercut the government with an important (though frequently ignored and insulted by Harper and his vile cronies) part of its own base. The C-30 debacle found the Tories knocked onto their asses for the first time in a long time, and even undermined Harper's reputation for managerial competence.
The coup-de-grace was delivered unto Towes himself, who - with his longstanding and well-deserved reputation as a beligerrent, half-bright hack - is roundly despised by right-thinking people of all political stripes. Vic Toews might be the most atavistic beast in politics today, recalling a time when superstitious stupidity wasn't just encouraged, but rewarded. Toews is the sort of guy that would have defended burning witches well into 1920s just because it worked in the United States 250 years earlier. He's spent most of his ward-heeling career angling for a judgeship, where he wouldn't have to work very hard or fear the Enlightenment ever reaching Provincher.
Another Twitter thread, called Vikileaks (since taken down, so I can't link to it) dumped his wife's divorce pleadings onto our laps. And, oh, what a story they tell. They reveal Toews to be, if not the sleaziest monster in all of Christendom, at least in the top five. Also, we learned that he appears to be possessed with a pathological babysitter fetish. His reputation is fundamentally destroyed in ways that can probably never be repaired. And this was done entirely by his own hand.
Toews could has presented his constitutionally pornograghic bill as a civil human being, but he's just not fucking built that way. Vic is programmed more like a minx, given to going for the throat, eating its young and shitting all over the place until it dies in its own filth. If you believe in God, you almost have to believe that the Fall and Decline of Vic Toews was devinely ordained. He's shit in his own nest - and through the Parliament of Canada, ours - so often that he's finally being buried in it.
The originiating IP address for Vikileaks appears to be from the Parliament Hill, so the Conservatives are blaming the NDP for it. This is because the Conservatives are opportunistic fuckheads. This is the Liberals at work, but the Grits are dying a slow and thoroughly enjoyable death, so the Tories want to pin it on the Dippers. They can't even defend the supposed honour of one of their own without lying, which tells you more about the Conservative Party of Canada than I ever could. They're self-righteous delusional cunts with an almost animal instinct for dissembling, which is to say that they've become the Liberals. And that goes a long way in explaining why nobody misses the Liberals all that much.
Yes, teenagers, a new day has truly dawned. This is a day that you don't propose laws that would wipe out the privacy of the citizenry, call those who disagree with your approach kidfuckers, and still get to keep your own skeletons safely in the closet. If the government aims to destroy our privacy, I have no problem whatsoever with annhilating theirs first. Let us finally establish who is supposed to answer to who in a goddamned democracy. Do we have to take this from the inbred shitheels that we elect and pay? We own these assholes, they don't own us!
They say that sunshine is the best disinfectant, but "they" aren't particularly gifted in turning a phrase. I prefer to say that the truth is an antibiotic that flushes parasitic microbes like Vic from our body politic before they can destroy us from our own innards.
I'm entirely too inclined toward common sense and human decency to praise Vic Toews, or even call for his proper political burial. But I think that we all have a common interest in ensuring that the dumb fucker stays dead and that his degenerate example serves as a warning to the more savage insticts of his tribe.
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