'Just Salute and Follow Orders': When Secrecy and Surveillance Trump the Rule of Law
By John Whitehead
Question: How can you tell when a politician is lying? Answer: When he's moving his lips.
If that didn't generate a chuckle, how about:
Q: Why is honesty in politics like oxygen?
A: The higher you go, the scarcer it gets.
Then there's President Obama's gaffe on the Tonight Show: "We don't have a domestic spying program," which is downright laughable in light of this past year's revelations about domestic spying by the National Security Agency. But if that still doesn't push you over the edge into near hysterics, here's one guaranteed to get the biggest laugh of all, at least from those clear-sighted enough to grasp the irony of a politician talking about "trust":
"If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law," declared President Obama in June 2013, in response to questions about the government's domestic spying program, "then we're going to have some problems here."
What's not at all amusing, of course, is the fact that our nation is riddled with all manner of problems, and it's because we have government officials in the executive branch, Congress, and the courts incapable of abiding by the Constitution. These people have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted to do what they say, and they certainly can't be trusted to abide by their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Indeed, the American people have been cheated and lied to for so long that we've arrived at a stage of disbelief and skepticism. So when the Obama administration announces that it will be rolling out proposals to rein in the NSA bulk collection of data about Americans' private communications, you'd be perfectly justified in wondering what other far-fetched schemes they plan to sell you next.
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