Hey Presto! The magician astounds us all with a slight of and and a proffering of plastic flowers, their existence seems impossible, but there they are. Citizen rights exchanged for an immigration issue.
The basis of this magician trick is simple; distract the public and perform the necessary changes to make the fate accompli. This little wrinkle seems to have been worked on the House and Senate with devastating effect. The Administration gets caught red-handed for massively violating the basic rights of its citizens, letting slip the NSA into our communication system - and nothing happens. Barely a squeak.
Apparently House and Senate Republicans do not realize that they just became muzzled.
Anyone who seriously thinks that the NSA will not defend itself with the weapons at hand either does not have a good grasp of Human behavior, or is numbered in the majority of the American public.
In the future, if the NSA's power is in any real way threatened by the House and/or Senate, you can be SURE that individual Representatives and Senators will be quietly approached by neatly dressed strangers that will quietly show them transcripts of their intimate personal phone conversations and email. The message will be clear: step over the line and you will be revealed to an outraged public.
The quiet extinction of a US citizen's right to free speech is almost complete.
Members of Senate of House are for the most part creatures of power. It almost goes without saying, otherwise they would not be members of these bodies.
It is therefore all the more astounding that only a few of them actually care that their intimate communications can be so easily harvested and used against them.
What can account for such a curious phenomenon? Perhaps the present preoccupation of House and Senate is some sort of weird subliminal manifestation of the drastic changes that are happening to their own freedoms. What is this strange behavior? The suppressing and bullying of the poorest strata of society, the illegal immigrants.
In the face of the threat to our freedoms perpetrated by the White House Administration and the NSA, the House/Senate preoccupation with illegals should be seen for what it really is: A cowardly, neurotic exhibition of wonton, wasted power. Stealing candy from a baby while the bully is busy burning down the house.
Illegal immigration is essentially a non-issue. Short of building a Berlin Wall, illegal immigrants will continue to pour across the border, and good thing too. They are the only segment of the American society willing to do the lowly jobs that the rest of our wealthy society depends on. This luxury of leisure that ordinary citizens enjoy allows Arizona vigilantes to hunt down illegals rather than doing the back-breaking work of toiling in our fields and factories for minimum wages.
Thus, the comedy of dead-end empires doth continue. The magician of fate performs its slight of hand, the guardians of freedom are momentarily dazzled by illusion. As they once again turn their attention to the job at hand, it is too late; the flame of freedom is extinguished by the magician.