Before:

One provision that troubles me a great deal is a provision that permits the government under FISA to compel the production of records from any business regarding any person, if that information is sought in connection with an investigation of terrorism or espionage. Now we’re not talking here about travel records pertaining to a terrorist suspect, which we all can see can be highly relevant to an investigation of a terrorist plot. FISA already gives the FBI the power to get airline, train, hotel, car rental and other records of a suspect. But under this bill, the government can compel the disclosure of the personal records of anyone — perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the company of, or whose phone number was called by — the target of the investigation. And under this new provisions all business records can be compelled, including those containing sensitive personal information like medical records from hospitals or doctors, or educational records, or records of what books someone has taken out of the library. This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision.

During:

Lawmakers who are now expressing outrage over the government’s surveillance of phone records and Internet activity should have paid closer attention when they were voting to reauthorize provisions in the Patriot Act, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Sunday. Reacting particularly to fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s assertion this week the programs amount to an “assault on the Constitution,” McCain told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley that members of Congress had not been left in the dark on what powers to government has in monitoring Americans. “The Republican and Democrat chairs, and … members of the Intelligence Committee have been very well briefed on these programs,” McCain said. “We passed the Patriot Act. We passed specific provisions of the act that allowed for this program to take place, to be enacted in operation. Now, if members of Congress did not know what they were voting on, then I think that that’s their responsibility a lot more than it is the government’s.”

After:

OMG- DID YOU HEAR? THE NSA IS DOING PRECISELY WHAT THOSE WHO WERE AGAINST THE PATRIOT ACT SAID THEY WOULD DO AND THOSE WHO SUPPORTED IT HOPED THEY WOULD!

I am so sick of this bullshit. Now let’s play the typical American political game. Some Dems will rush to the defense of Obama and help to make sure these policies are not undone because, well, Republicans and evil civil libertarians are saying bad things and tribalism, even though the issue is not Obama or the need to defend Obama, the most POWERFUL FUCKING MAN IN THE WORLD WHO IS NEVER RUNNING FOR OFFICE AGAIN. BUT HEY, WHEN YOU ARE A PARTISAN, YOU GOTTA DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO.

Right wing douchebags, who were completely ok with WARRANTLESS wiretapping (NOT TO MENTION TORTURE AND RANDOMLY INVADING COUNTRIES TO BRING THEM OUR FREEDUMBS EVEN THOUGH THEY SPENT EIGHT YEARS TELLING US THEY HATED US FOR OUR FREEDUMBS) during the Bush years and jammed through the Patriot Act legalizing this in the first place can now pretend that Obama is worse than Nixon/Stalin/Joffrey Baratheon. This Patriot Act and the NSA are doing EXACTLY what they intended for it to do.

And then the media can sit there with there thumbs up their collective asses trying to figure out what exactly is going on, because the j-school flunkouts who make up our media are dumb as a sack of hammers and half of them don’t know the difference between FISA and a wallflower or PRISM and a popsicle, and we will continue like this until a cute white girl is kidnapped and we can move on to substantial issues.

And for the record, Obama is not the villain here, he’s just dealing with the laws as they were passed, and it looks like they did everything correctly and followed the letter of the law. If he hadn’t done everything to the extent of the law to implement the patriot act and something happened, they same jackasses now feigning outrage on the right would be flaming him for being soft on terror. Snowden is not the villain here, he just felt this needed to be out there, and if one more jackass all-in Obama supporter tells me he endangered national security, I swear to ALLAH I will start punching babies. The only thing he endangered were the talking points for the permanent security state. The NSA is not the villain here- they are just doing what we allowed them to do. Glenn Greenwald is not the villain here, he’s a civil libertarian who has warned about this and is now reporting the excesses of the program.

No, you want to see the villain, look in the mirror. It’s the pants-wetting populace of the United States, who votes for these assholes who pass bad laws in moments of crisis, because we have to do something and because Americans, unlike every other nation in the world, have a god given right to be safe at all times from all things.

Fuck you all. The only thing that might save this country from a couple more weeks of this partisan bullshit obscuring important issues is maybe we’ll get lucky and a cute young blonde girl will get kidnapped and we can move on to something else.