Tuesday, December 20, 2005

1981? ...82?

I never cease to be amazed at how the White House's own web page is faithfully documenting and publicizing this administration's stupidities. In a way, I guess, it's strangely comforting. I mean, consider the alternative. What if all the embarassing Bushisms were whitewashed away, replaced by erudite prose? The implications, if that were the case, bring disturbing thoughts to mind--memory holes... Ministries of Truth... that sort of thing.

It seems we're not quite there, yet, as you can plainly see here, where Alberto Gonzales does a lot of hand-waving, dodging, and dashing in response to the question, "If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally?"

That question was asked earlier. We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

My translation: "It wasn't bloody likely that we would be able to do what we wanted legally, but we went ahead and did it anyway."

Billmon over at The Whiskey Bar has an even better translation.

1 comment:

Lippard said...

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/12/bill_kristol_sm.shtml#012064

The above link is Jeff A. Taylor commenting on a Bill Kristol column attempting to support Bush's actions. Taylor uses the headline "Bill Kristol Smokes Crack and Writes a Column" and concludes: "If America is going to a have a chief executive who may unilaterally, by virtue of his oath of office, investigate, detain, and jail anyone, anywhere that the chief executive deems to be a threat to the state and to society, it would be nice if we could comment on that development without being snorted at and insulted."