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Who to blame now?

Don Rogers
Laura Mahaffy/lmahaffy@theunion.com | The Union

The scandal mongers are flummoxed.

Suddenly, serious as the original offenses were, those wishing to gin up partisan outrage over the IRS, Benghazi and one closer to my heart, the feds snooping on reporters, don’t know what to do with the truly serious secret of the day — the government collecting our cell phone and online records.

Never mind that Google and Facebook, not to mention Verizon and AT&T, know a lot more about us than our spooks. (And it sounds like some quality time with a phone book and invoices would accomplish the same thing as the rather breathless accounts of big brothering to collect our cell phone numbers and email addresses, as well as when/where communications were committed.)



It’s an outrage, I know, I know.

But who to blame? The conservatives in particular are very frustrated. The libs are supposed to be weak on secret security. The best they could come up with was Bush’s Darth Vader, the dark lord of surveillance himself, former Veep Dick Cheney declaring that President Obama has no credibility.

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Really? This is too rich. The pot calling the kettle … well, never mind.

Bush did it. Obama did, too. Hate to break this to you, but they all have.

I’m way too sanguine about this, I know. Maybe that’s because I imagine the sheer boredom NSA operatives would endure by actually listening in to my phone calls and reading my emails. Go ahead. Yes, I know it’s against the law and even the secret courts supposedly would not allow it unless they thought I was bent on violent jihad. (There, maybe that word will get me flagged!)

I mean, I don’t have time to keep track of the 24 souls I’m responsible for at work, never mind 315 million Americans updating their Facebook inanities, weaving on the road while having those no-doubt fascinating conversations on their cell phones that are so much more crucial than their (and our) lives, and developing carpel syndrome from deleting all that junk mail in the in-box.

Dear God, what’s Fox to do now? Report that those evildoers at the IRS “targeted” liberal groups, too, or leave it to those wimps at NPR to handle this inconvenient truth?

Meantime, the only one more treasonous than Edward Snowden, the computer geek who had the run of the Hall of Secrets, apparently is C-Span, which has been reporting on this for years. Of course, who watches them?

It’s funny that we have less of an issue with our more far detailed information being used against us for marketing than the mega data trends that help protect the populace from terrorist attacks. I say “help” because the Chechen bafoons in Boston managed to evade the net pretty easily to commit their atrocity.

Sure, the history of governments around the world is scary. Marketing pretty much is just mischief, although it does show the path for true intrusion into our personal lives.

This seems like a little more important of a discussion to have than trotting out Cheney, of all people, to weigh in about another administration’s credibility.

Jon Stewart couldn’t have come up with better.


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