You're Wrong, Dubya

First of all, Mister President--Prove It.

Prove that your eavesdropping program doesn’t target ordinary Americans. You’ve long-since lost the trust of the American people, and it’s time to let the FISA court review your activities to ensure their lawfulness.

Your wiretapping speech today was deceptively precise. You said the government “does not listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant.” But you conveniently avoided the emerging fact that the government does a lot of other things to our phone calls without a warrant.

USA Today reports that the NSA now tracks most all calls, capturing the timing and numbers called without actually recording the content. Is this not “mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” to use your words?

At the very least, it seems to violate the spirit of the law.

Secondly, your values and priorities are entirely wrong. You stated that “our most important job is to defeat this [al Qaeda] enemy.”

Wrong.

Our most important job is to safeguard the Constitution and protect the liberties and values our nation rests upon. If we discard or denude our values in the pursuit of an enemy, we've already lost.

But you just don’t seem to understand this fundamental distinction.

Indeed, you seem hell-bent on re-interpreting and selectively ignoring our laws to suit your own disgraceful partisan purposes.

Until you let objective third-parties review your spying activities, the public will justifiably view you as guilty until proven innocent, withholding the trust you have failed to earn.

UPDATE:

As the facts emerge and the discourse sharpens, one thing is becoming clear:

Though perhaps not listening, Big Brother is watching us closely.