Ah, poor Cao is again doing her damnedest to provide still more evidence that she is one of the most clueless, cognitively impaired bloggers on the planet. And she’s doing a terrific job of it, too.
She posted this vacuous screed this morning, regarding a recent ruling in the matter of the Bush administration’s profligate use of warrantless wiretaps. Let’s look at it carefully; studying this hogwash provides a fascinating insight into the far-right capacity for self-delusion.
Looking at the headlines, you just have to laugh. Look at the leftist hysterics.
Federal appeals court overturns wiretap ruling (Detroit Free Press)
Panel Dismisses Suit Challenging Secret Wiretaps (New York Times)
US Appeals Court Orders Surveillance Case Dismissed (Update3) (Bloomberg)
Court dismisses suit over wiretaps (Fort Worth Star Telegram)
Now, normal people reading those headlines would see simple, straightforward statements of the court’s recent action. Cao sees “hysterics” where none exist. Self-delusion, pure and simple.
So the American people are thinking, hey. Warrantless wiretapping? Shouldn’t there be a warrant?
Yes, many people do think there should be a warrant — because that is what FISA requires. A January 2006 poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal [PDF] found that a majority of Americans agreed that the Bush administration should be required to get a court order before conducting wiretaps of American citizens.
Well do you really think there should have to be a warrant? In 2002, Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, was captured in Afghanistan.1 Computers and cell phones with phone numbers were valuable bits of information the CIA obtained in that raid. Did they have to have a warrant?
No. Warrants are not required for gathering intelligence overseas. No one is suggesting that they should be. FISA does, however, clearly state that wiretaps may be obtained without a court order only when “there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party”. Period. Wiretaps directed against American citizens require a warrant. Period.
You can take any number of close calls that have hit the news and draw a similar conclusion about the dangers we face if we don’t allow the NSA to do this monitoring.
No one has suggested that the NSA be forbidden to collect intelligence information on terrorist plots. However, the NSA should, like any other government agency, and like ordinary American citizens, be expected to operate within the law. The only hysterics here are coming from Cao herself.
Take for example the Ohio trucker, Lyman Farris, who plotted to bomb the Brooklyn bridge. If the ACLU has its way, though, a guy like Farris will have every right to talk on a secure private line with Bin Laden himself.
The ACLU has never made such a suggestion. Cao now descends, as she always does, into outright lying.
It never fails. Cao decides what reality she wants to live in beforehand, and then publishes whatever lies or distortions are needed to support her fantasy world. It’s sad, really… but it is also immensely entertaining to see her destroy her own credibility with almost every post.
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July 17th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
kemibe
I found these statements on an amazingly disjointed and error-packed post of Cao’s from a couple of years ago:
“Creationists are using science to prove that the Bible is true; and they’re doing a more effective job of it than the Evolutionists are proving that The Origin Of Species is true.”
“High-school textbooks represent the worst of evolution education, rehearsing long-disproved evidences such as the peppered moth, vestigial organs, and mutated fruit flies.”
“ID experts are scrupulously secular, and their proposals are neither Christian nor creationist.”
“Darwin’s theory said … that life itself was not created by God, but happened because the right chemicals came together by chance in the ancient ocean.”
“Darwin’s theory says fish evolved, through many intermediate steps, into human beings.”
“If the theory of evolution is true, it would follow that species would not be going extinct because the environment is changing, they’d simply mutate and change with the environment.”
“Even millions of years in the jungle, donkeys would still be donkeys, because they only have donkey genes.”
Jungle donkeys! They’re as common as marine lions and desert manatees, you know.
This list barely scratches the surface. Cao has to some extent afforded herself the paradoxical protection from criticism enjoyed by especially verbose morons: She’s flung out so many lies and misunderstandings that settling on and refuting even 10 percent of them would take far too long, and convince her of nothing.
I wouldn’t hold your breath expecting Cao to respond with any integrity or stop deleting your comments. She’s a crackpot, angry, ignorant, and supremely smug; she speaks with the sort of drunken-preacher bombast that lures other nutbags into the fold—anyone whose emotion-to-reason ratio tops 1,000 is automatically afforded credibility by the Fudd brigade. This allows Cao to gain confidence and keep at bay the reality of her far-flung stupidity. When confronted with someone who is actually informed, she recoils in fear and rage, like all Internet nutzos.