Thursday, February 28, 2008

suck it up

earlier today, bush was asked a very good question:
You can get the Congress to protect telecom companies from lawsuits, but then there’s no recourse for Americans who feel that they’ve been caught up in this. I know it’s not intended to spy on Americans, but in the collection process, information about everybody gets swept up and then it gets sorted. So if Americans don’t have any recourse, are you just telling them, when it comes to their privacy, to suck it up?
bush didn't really know how to respond. instead he just said that "America's civil liberties are well protected"1 and then went into a long digression about why he wants telecom immunity so badly, which didn't answer the question. and which suggests that the answer is basically yes, suck it up.

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1-it's interesting that he said "america's civil liberties" instead of "american's civil liberties". it makes it look like he's trying to shift the emphasis from individual rights to collective rights of the nation as a whole. except that conservatives in the u.s. have traditionally been against collective rights. on the other hand, maybe bush meant to say "american's" and garbled his sentence. you can never rule that out with this guy.