First of all, some introductory material is in order. This is my first post here at Daily Kos. I've been an Internet user since 1991, and while I've engaged in many lively political debates on sites like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Fark, I've never really been involved with "true" political sites and/or weblogs until now. Too much has happened in our nation and our world over the course of the last five years or so, and mindless complacency carries with it a price tag that is far too burdensome to bear. So it's time to get involved.
I just got home from my regular Monday night golf league. On the way home, I managed to catch a bit of a rerun of Sean Hannity's radio program. In this bit, he gloated about a recent poll showing that a "solid plurality" of the American public believed that the New York Times was guilty of "treason". While listening to this, I couldn't help but feel that the "Democratic strategists" responsible for advocating our party's positions and talking points had dropped the ball .. badly.
More below the fold.
Keith Olbermann used the term "manufactured outrage" to describe the reaction that the right wing has had to the New York Times article on the Bush administration's "secret" program to track terrorist finances, and from my perspective, there can be no more apt description of their response. Being new here, I was not around to read much of the commentary in the immediate aftermath of this "revelation", but readers of Daily Kos will certainly be familiar with the fact that the Bush administration has been bragging this program up for nearly five years now.
Consumers of the truth are well aware of the fact that President Bush announced this program on September 24th, 2001. They are well aware of the fact that Paul O'Neill and his underlings provided many salacious details about this program (including the names of specific banks in Saudi Arabia that had been targeted for monitoring) in the following weeks. They are well aware that these people have not been accused of treason by the right, and that the New York Times article provided very little in the way of new information that terrorists would find useful.
What bothers me is the fact that our representatives in the media have done a very poor job of focusing on the elements of the New York Times story that were, in fact, news. It was not news that the U.S. government was working with officials with SWIFT to monitor monetary transactions. It was news, however, that our government had access to this database in such a manner that (once again) things like warrants and judicial review never entered the picture. It was not news that several potential terrorist operations were thwarted because of this program. It was news, however, that members of our own government had been reprimanded and (in one case) fired for inappropriate use of this database.
I have a question for all of our "Democratic consultants" who frequent the political discussion programs on American television and radio programs: Why the hell aren't you people focusing on the privacy aspects of this program? I mean, for God's sake, we are on the eve of the submittal of a Treasury Department report about the "irreparable damage" done to our country's ability to track terrorist finances, and many of us are still on the defensive, as if the NYT story was something to be ashamed of.
In many ways, I must admit that I almost admire the Republican spin machine. They have managed to almost completely eradicate any and all concerns about the privacy of average American citizens by invoking faux patriotism and accusing the Times of treason. If we had competent spokespeople representing us in the media, they never would have been allowed to do this. Instead, we've been far too preoccupied with defending the Times for exposing a "secret" program that was never secret to begin with, while at the same time neglecting our duty to inform the American public of yet another potential invasion of their privacy in the name of Fighting Terror.
Folks, there are way too many privacy considerations related to this program for us to remain complacent. Why aren't our representatives in the media crying foul about this? Why are we taking the Republican bait and allowing them to define the terms of the debate? Why can't we take the bull by the horns and 1) expose the blatant hypocrisy of the right-wing crocodile tears regarding the "revealing" of this program and 2) focus on what is really important, which is yet another hole in the wall of privacy that should surround normal Americans and their day-to-day affairs?