Cheney Shoots Friend In Face, Self In Foot, Nation In Heart

The White House gang that couldn’t shoot straight, led by that poster-boy for gun safety, Dick Cheney, appears to have nevertheless scored a direct hit on our civil liberties, having shot straight into the heart of our personal conversations and private correspondences. A newly-disclosed program (link expired), existing alongside the illegal wiretapping program being assailed by individuals of conscience on both sides of the political divide, has apparently violated “millions of Americans’” civil rights.

According to the United Press, reports yesterday allege that the Bush administration has systematically engaged in an even more serious and bigger secret spying program than the one we’ve all been hot under the collar about for the past few months. The war on terror has apparently become a war of terror, and friends, I have to say, consider me a casualty. I am terrified.

But not of Osama. I’m terrified of our own home-grown dictators, the Cheneys, Bushes, Poindexters and other power-mad scoundrels who this very day, this very moment, are trawling through our private correspondences, our e-mails and blogs, and listening in on our phone calls (WITHIN U.S. borders, mind you) with no regard for two-hundred-plus years of established civil rights protections. If what this article asserts is true, then we as Americans have far worse enemies than Islamic terrorists, far worse in fact than any we’ve faced in the last sixty years or more.

And they’re sitting in the White House today.

Osama cannot shred the Constitution, but Bush and Cheney can. The Soviets at the zenith of their influence could not export their toxic brand of domestic spying on their own innocent citizens to our shores. But Bush doesn’t need imported tyranny; he has the dictatorship he famously pined for.