Disgrace

"The disclosure of this program is disgraceful...and makes it harder to win this war on terror." President George W. Bush announced today in reference to a story which first broke, in last week's New York Times, about the Treasury Department's surreptitious practice of data mining millions of banking records, including those of ordinary citizens such as you and me. (AP)

On The Times Web site yesterday. the paper's Executive Editor Bill Keller posted a letter which belongs in every political science textbook of every major university both here and abroad in which he reminded this president, his Treasury Department, as well as the head of the House Committee on Homeland Security that he, and his reporters, were merely doing their "job" and, if anything, were being conservative in what they divulged, even to the chagrin of one former president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who suggested that, had newspapers disclosed more information about the Bay of Pigs beforehand, the entire affair might have been avoided. (NYT)

That the executive editor of a major American newspaper, or any newspaper, should feel compelled, and obliged, to defend his paper's decision to to publish "all the news that's fit to print" is the true disgrace here, a flagrant insult to the Bill of Rights, and the survivors of all those who have given their lives to protect, and defend, a way of life which is currently under attack, not from Al Qaeda, but from those who want to criminalize desecrating the American flag while they sodomize the Constitution.

The only thing that makes it harder to win "this war on terror" is an administration that continues to act like a rat in a maze, trapped in a series of secret, illegal, and conspicuously failed manuevers to distract us all, with its counterfeit missions, while reaching their hands, firmly, into our pockets, and lining their wallets with our retirement accounts, and our children's future. The world is a far more dangerous place today thanks to the politics of greed, and deception, practiced in the name of a concocted war, with no clear beginning, and an even more ambiguous end, that is wreaking havoc with our economy, and the moral climate of this great land.