FOX News, the president’s propaganda channel, just aired a one hour documentary attempting to compare President Bush and his legacy to President Lincoln. Naturally the usual Fox News idiocity not prevailed (as noted by Think Progress, Lincoln wasn’t hated when he left office, he was assassinated just after being re-elected by an overwhelming margin).
As expected from myself and a lot of other people, the State of the Union address (hopefully the last) given by President Bush was no surprise, and was filled with the usual scare tactics aimed at bullying Congress and getting his way, regardless of public opinion or truth, and the usual lies involving Iraq and the economy.
The ACLU published a report that does a good job of debunking Bush’s State of Delusion address, I mean his State of the Union address last night. One lie involved Bush telling the public that on February 1, when the Protect America Act expires, terrorists will be calling other terrorists in the United States and our intelligence agencies won’t be able to eavesdrop — and our citizens will be in great danger because Senate Democrats refused to cave in to his demands and pass the faulty legislation intended to cover his butt, his administrations butt and the butts of telecoms involved in the illegal spying. If the Protect America Act expired, Americans would probably be a lot safer.
The secret FISA Court that authorizes wiretap arrest warrants has only rejected 5 requests for warrants — 5 requests out of over 20,000 requests from 1979 through 2006. Obviously FISA laws have done nothing to impede our ability to track terrorist threats. In an emergency, agencies have a 72 hour windows that allows them to start a wiretap and get it authorized later. On top of that, all current surveillance orders started now can be extended into 2009.