Rahm Emanuel Thinks You're Stupid

Statement from Rahm Emanuel yesterday, lauding the FISA "agreement":

The FISA legislation we will consider gives our intelligence community the tools it needs and the public the civil liberty protections it deserves. In addition, it rejects calls for automatic immunity for private sector companies. While this bill isn’t perfect, the perfect should never be the enemy of the good. I applaud the Democrats and Republicans who reached this compromise and produced legislation that deserves support from both sides of the aisle.

Of course, Emanuel is correct: the bill doesn't give automatic immunity to the phone companies. It instead cleverly shifts the calls for immunity to the courts -- directing them to automatically grant that immunity to any company that was told by the President that what he was asking for was legal. And since we know the President went to the phone companies arguing that FISA-less, warrantless, anti-Constitutional domestic espionage was now legal because he said so, that's the end of that.

But hey, Rahm Emanuel thinks you're too stupid to understand that. Or perhaps he just doesn't care.

After all, Emanuel says these are the "civil liberty protections" you "deserve." If the President said it, that makes it legal, and if you don't like that new interpretation of your rights, hey -- you're just against "compromise." In this case, "compromise" means blanket immunity for everyone involved: they don't have to prove that what they were doing was legal -- because they can't, we know it violated the law -- they just have to prove that the President told them to do it anyway, and we'll just forget the whole thing. And let them keep doing it. And they don't actually have to come clean on the extent of what "it" was, or is.

According to Emanuel, that's all the protection you "deserve." All this violating-the-law nonsense is just water under the bridge, if your company has enough lobbyists.