We've all speculated about his careful parsing of the phrases "the program that we're talking about today" or "the program that the President has confirmed". Now, barely a week after Rove comes out with the marching orders that spinning the wiretap issues the right way will lead to (R) victories in the upcoming elections - suddenly we've got (R)'s calling for investigations and more info. Have they returned to their actual "no big gov't intrusion" conservative roots or might there be another game in play?
Polls are showing way too many Americans upset by this issue for the ReThugs to simply spin it once again as "you're either for illegal wiretaps or with the terrorists". So, to win elections, they need to show how strong they are on Law & Order, holding the (mis)Administration accountable.
What steps do they have to take to 'win' on this issue?
- Loudly call for investigations
- Admin finally gives in and forks up more info (on the program that the President confirmed)
- Committee reports verify cumbersome nature of current law, everything changed 9/11, blah, blah
- Write new law, very specific to this one issue that President confirmed
- Start PR campaign to shift from broken law and illegal activity to how they strenghtend America by enacting new law in WOT
- Demonize Democrats for obstructing over any arguements
- Carefully word new law to allow all other surveillance gov't wishes to do under Total Info Awareness
Boomantribune.comGonzales came to the committee to discuss one thing and one thing only. He calls it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP), a term coined by bloggers. I will refer to it as NSA Domestic Spying Plan One (DSP1).
<snip>
What nobody talked about was all the other DSP programs, numbers 2-999. The ones that are not strictly focused on international calls. I'm talking about programs like data mining browser and search engine usage (DSP2), surveillance of peace and anti-war groups (DSP3), data mining emails (DSP4), using JPEN and other "total information awareness" type databases (DSP5), using computers to data mine domestic phone calls (DSP6), passing along NSA information on Americans (illegal) to other agencies like the FBI (DSP7), etc.
The Senate hearings were interesting, that's for sure, but they were largely useless. Gonzales was there to talk about DSP1 and only DSP1 and since it involves people reasonably believed to be Al-Qaeda terrorists, the Congress is going to do nothing about it. The American people don't care if the government is spying on Al-Qaeda (even in America), in fact they support it wholeheartedly. I finally figured out why the administration is stumping on the issue - it's because they're only talking about DSP1 and it sounds great. Who could really be opposed to spying on "known" terrorists?
DSP1 is just one tiny "tool" used by the administration and it is by far the most acceptable one to the American people. When the New York Times revealed that there were DSP's, the administration focused on DSP1 and only on DSP1 and framed it in such a way that only petty sticklers to the law could object. This is a war after all!