Texas swindlers

Maybe The Bush Regime is neither recycled 40's-style fascists, nor a 70's-style Argentinian tinhorn military junta. Maybe they're just 1890's-style Texas swindlers. Today, Glenn Greenwald uses "swindled" to describe the effect of The Regime's pack of lies offered to Congress in 2005 to ensure reauthorization of The [non-]Patriot Act with an expanded program of national secuity letters (NSLs). All this came after the Washington Post article describing FBI abuses of NSLs, a report that the Department of (ahem) Justice called "materially misleading". Of course it was the DOJ that was actually doing the material misleading.

The DOJ's assurances given to Congress were plainly given without the slightest effort to determine whether those assurances were true. The DOJ simply denied that there was any wrongdoing with regard to NSLs but had they bothered to investigate the Post's claims even slightly -- rather than just reflexively denying any wrongdoing -- they would have discovered what the IG discovered.

But they were only interested in one goal: swindling the Congress into re-authorizing the Patriot Act, and so they repeatedly sought to assure Congress that concerns over the NSLs were unfounded even though they either (a) had no idea whether that was true or (b) knew that it was false. If we tolerate DOJ officials falsely denying accurate press reports of illegal surveillance -- all in order to induce Congress to enact legislation vesting vast powers of surveillance against U.S. citizens -- what don't we tolerate?

What don't we tolerate? Ohmigod. Fortunately that was a rhetorical question. To paraphrase the ancient prophets, in this country we now call darkness, day, and the light we call night.