Tuesday, June 11, 2013

An Inverted War in a Surveillance State

Via Daily Timewaster

 Surveillance State

Excerpt

We have a sort of inverted war going on and sadly, that war has enthusiasts on both sides of the aisle. This war is being waged by people who send F-16 fighter jets to Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt, while seeking to limit American citizens to seven bullets in their own defense. It's a war in which our armed forces are emasculated even as domestic agencies amass military weaponry and hardware at an alarming rate, thereby leaving the law-abiding citizen vulnerable to both foreign enemies and his own government. This is a war in which an American ambassador and staff are left defenseless during an attack overseas,  abandoned by a  Commander-in-Chief who has yet to account for his own actions that day, but who nevertheless scurried about the land for weeks fraudulently insisting that responsibility rested on the head of an American video producer who remains incarcerated to this day. It is a war in which our government labels an attack on US soldiers by a Muslim shouting "Allahu Akbar" as, "workplace Vvolence," while labeling Americans who embrace the freedoms enshrined in our founding documents as potential terrorists.

We live in a time in which an Air Force wing commander removes from a base dining facility a Bible verse reading, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God," on word of an unhappy atheist, thereby discovering a heretofore unknown constitutional right not to be offended. An Army Master Sergeant is reprimanded for reading books by conservative authors while Air Force personnel are directed to avoid accessing stories regarding the government's surveillance of American citizens from government computers (often times the only way military members serving overseas can read the news).

We have an IRS that openly persecutes American citizens on the basis of their political beliefs while the EPA flies unmanned drones over the heads of American farmers just to make sure they are behaving. Our government monitors the phone lines of journalists suspected of printing leaked information all while illegally passing along the private information of individual citizens it has gathered to political opponents for purposes of harassment and intimidation. Is there now any wonder why so many of us rejected the idea of a national firearms registry? It is in this larger context that the government's snooping on law-abiding citizens becomes even more problematic. 

Complete piece @ Ricochet

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