All the President's Spies, or Why Isn't This News

Yesterday morning, I heard another infuriating item of Bush and Co's total moral and ethical bankruptcy on NPR. The NSA has obtained the call records of three of the big telecommunication companies. Qwest is the only holdout and good for them.

I read All The President's Men about a year ago. I wanted to learn just what the hell had happened in the Watergate scandal. I would recommend that book to anyone because it was really interesting to learn how investigative journalism works and how it is necessary to maintain a democracy. I have said this before, but I'll relate it again. I met Daniel Ellsberg in the summer of 2001. I programmed his VCRs and showed him how to record TV shows. I had no idea who he was or why my parents were so impressed. In case you don't know who he is either, links for you.

I watched All The President's Men last night. Those were the days.

Today, Washingtonpost.com has only this to say about the wiretapping and call records fiasco:

Post-ABC Poll
Support Found for NSA Program
Call-tracking is an acceptable way to investigate terrorism,
63 percent of Americans say.
–Richard Morin 7 a.m. ET

A fucking poll of:

"A total of 502 randomly selected adults were interviewed Thursday night for this survey. Margin of sampling error is five percentage points for the overall results. The practical difficulties of doing a survey in a single night represents another potential source of error."

The wiretapping, internet search engine records and call records add up to a massively bad picture of our executive running wild again. Just like Nixon's administration, Bush and Co are destroying our democracy through an executive branch that believes its word is law and an intelligence agency that is complicit with every edict and act of that executive. Unlike the Nixon administration, the Washington Post does not care to actually report anything biting on the Bush administration. They should be listed in the coalition of the willing along with Faux News, CNN, and pretty much everyone else.

This is like watching a group of six year olds playing soccer, but one team is afraid of the ball. Every time the ball comes near the fraidy cats, they either kick it out of bounds or run away. The other team is scoring circles around them. I've never even taken a journalism class¹ and I feel like I could write circles around these assholes.² If they weren't busy getting humped by Scott McClellan and now Tony Snow.

If this isn't blatant evidence that the liberal media is a myth, then I am a giant cobag. At this point, I have a better chance of slaying a gorgon or minotaur than I do of finding a newspaper willing to aggressively pursue a story of governmental malfeasance.

Incidentally, the NSA says that the soreness in right asscheek should fade in a few days and that the tracking and monitoring device will not begin to leak radiation into my bloodstream for at least a month or two.

UPDATE at 2 PM: So the Washington Post print edition and the New York Times print edition both have articles about this. This makes me feel a little better, but the fact that they were both scooped by USA Today still pisses me off. These papers are behaving like little baby birds waiting for Mama White House to drop some news in their laps. They really need to get off their asses and get the stories. Still pissed off.

1 Although I did write a piece for the college newspaper, The Round Table. The editors only cut some bits, they didn't add anything to it.

2 Off topic, Ben D is still a giant chunderwad.