Reading the NYT you'd think the government was breaking into your house to put a tap on your phone. The NSA intercepts calls at a point outside the United States, before they reach our shores.

"Eavesdrop on calls inside the United States" is a deliberately misleading choice of words.

It makes me wonder who they have been talking to, to be so exercised.

Posted by: jd watson at January 25, 2006 4:58 AM

One wonders what Mr. Hebert's position would be on the surveillance of people who have phone sex with terrorists.

Muggeridge's classic rant "The Liberal Death Wish" talked about how so much of liberal thinking comes down to sex--and this was years ago. It is weird to find oneself trying to fight off the natural prudishness of middle age while at the same time seeing so much evidence of how right he was. It continually astounds me how many everyday modern types staunchly defend what I call their right to "sex in reserve". They themselves might express extreme personal distaste and not dream of engaging, and they know their spouses would go ballistic if they did, but somehow they think it is extremely important to keep all options open and worry about the plight of some mythical solid co-citizen who is just "expressing himself" naturally and healthily. A huge, sordid and exploitative sex trade is built on such infantile thinking and on the paranoid fear of being seen as a prude.

Winston Smythe approached the checkpoint, beads of sweat forming on the back of his neck. Had he removed everything from his briefcase that might reveal to roving hands and prying eyes that he was a member of the Opposition or of the National Shooting Sports Association? His latest copy of Guns and Ammo? His little plastic-pistol keychain as he was frisked, Winston’s thoughts drifted to his ride to the airport–it had been a bad day all around.

While he was caught in traffic, one of the dozens of surveillance cameras that routinely photographed cars and their contents had found his. No doubt it caught the gun catalogs strewn on his passenger seat, including the one featuring several mean-looking hunting rifles similar to those Congress had recently outlawed One of the charitable organizations that Winston helped support from his comfortable but decidedly unpretentious salary was the International Shooting, Hunting, and Archery Society. Like its older and better-known cousin, the National Rifle Association, ISHAS supported not only the right to keep and bear arms, but also environmentally responsible hunting. He knew nothing of the organization’s overseas activities, much less that it was peripherally involved in a nationalistic political movement on the Indian subcontinent— They had not even publicly identified ISHAS as a terrorist organization. No
matter, under what Washington wags had wryly dubbed the new Son of Patriot Act, they didn’t have to.

Winston contemplated these past events from his deportation cell, thinking I'm in some deep sh*t. I wonder if they know about the postings I made at Orinetta Judds site? True, she's slightly nutty, but surely they don't think....

Our Lord understood this very well. He taught that the wrathful was already a murderer in his heart, the lustful an adulterer.

The left-wing and libertine defenders of the "right" to sin, and of the "right" to do so in "private," are therefor steeped in spiritual sin. This sort of sin pervades those people's thought.

For example, the advocate of baby-murder on demand might never actually commit the act, but still bear a measure of guilt for compassing it. He or she has not done it yet because the situation has not arisen, but the sinner has gamed out the murder option. So it is with the spiritually wrathful who have not yet committed acts of racial or eco-terrorism but entertain thoughts of doing so.

Does not this explain both those people's obsession with "privacy," and their derangement concerning the President? By naming his favorite philosopher and by appointing justices who think like Scalia and Thomas, the President has signalled what he thinks of this kind of "privacy."

This ties in with an earlier comment about how the Democrat party has sold itself to the morbidly obsessed. As they lost their traditional base through economic and demographic change, they have come to be dominated by the demon-possessed.

So, Bob Herbert wants to talk dirty with Osama's sisters. No surprise there. If he could just restrain himself to calling MoDo at 3:00 AM, then he wouldn't have a problem.

Litening to my telephone conversations? I would think that Dick Cheney's operative had the lousiest job in the world, that's what I would think.

[Notice how he still can't quite fathom that GWB is the president and not a puppet? Weird.]

With cordless phones, I already assume that all my neighbors can hear my conversations through their phones, baby monitors, etc., if not directly through the walls.

"The corrosive damage that is being done"

I tried watching the news on NBC TV last night because I can't stand ABC anymore. It was 1/2 hour of complaints going back to Katrina. It was truly depressing for me and I'd guess for the general public, regardless of affiliation. If the public psyche is being corroded it could be ameliorated by taking back the public spectrum from the major broadcast TV companies. I'm dead serious. That is not a rant but a sad observation. Fix that problem first.

Didn't the NY Times support Campaign Finance Reform? What has been more corrosive to the First Amendment than that in the last 100 years?

I don't think it would stop Pat O'Brien.

I've heard of Herbie the Love Bug...but not Herbert's Love Bugged.

gen: don't worry, no one watches the news on the big 3 networks, that isn't in a rest home somewhere.

aog: the war on drugs has been more corrosive overall (not just to the 1st amendment). the income tax has had some pretty corrosive effects too.

peterb: agreed

Peter B:

That Muggeridge essay is profound -- one of my all-time favorites, in fact.