The tragic shootings in San Bernadino earlier this week have created a political field day for the usual idiotic partisan arguments -- which tend to have little to nothing to do with whatever actually happened. You have people on one side using it to call for gun control and folks on the other side using it to spark fears of "domestic terrorism." And, of course, it didn't take long for someone to pop up with using it as an excuse to call for greater surveillance. That was the argument that former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took on MSNBC yesterday when asked what should be done in response. MSNBC Kate Snow asked if this could lead to bipartisan support for gun control (ha ha!) and Fleischer turned it around to say the answer is more surveillance.
Well, I hope there will be bipartisan support to really increase our surveillance. If you want to fight terrorism -- what happened in Paris and what apparently now happened in California -- the answer is not gun control or pipe bomb control (they also had 12 pipe bombs). The answer is more surveillance, tougher surveillance at home, so we can detect these attacks before they go off and protect people. We've done it many times in the past. We have the techniques. We need to make sure we're using those techniques.
Almost all of that is complete bullshit of course -- not that Snow calls him on it, because that's not what cable news hosts do. Fleischer repeats the same line a few more times after this, saying over and over again "surveillance stops terrorism." Except, there's been little proof of that. Over and over again, it's been shown that the domestic surveillance programs have failed to stop a single domestic terrorist act.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time until someone tries to connect the fact that the NSA's bulk collection of domestic phone records "ended" (and the quotes are there on purpose) this past weekend with the shooting this week. But, of course, that leaves out that the system was in place leading up to this and no one apparently knew a damn thing.
Once again, it's fairly astounding how these surveillance state cheerleaders will use any situation -- even their own failures -- to argue it means we just need greater surveillance.
But, really, for all of Fleischer's bullshit talk about how this is a moment for America to "come together," doesn't that include respecting things like the 4th Amendment?
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