Step Outta Line, The Man Come... By: Mark W Adams

(Sorry, but I'll explode if I don't get this song out of my system.)

...And he take you away.

Very little information on the NSA Program's successes, failures, and abuses has come out thusfar; and indeed it may be less likely that more comes out in the future: Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports tonight that the administration has raided the home of a former DOJ lawyer, Thomas Tamm, seizing his and his kids' computers, on suspicion that he was involved in leaking the program's existence to the media. Now that Congress is out of the oversight picture, I suppose it's time to kill the messengers and thereby get the media out of it too.

What, you may ask led to Tamm being led off the the most convenient gulag? Fresh off their latest finger-pointing circle-jerk and pointless demagoguery, Wingnuttystan speculates that crazed lefty blogging is to blame:

What this Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff doesn't mention is what might have caused the FBI to be suspicious of the alleged leaker---BDS blog postings by Thomas Tamm. One such BDS posting was made by a reader identifying himself as Thomas Mann in the New York Times The Caucus political blog.

Shocking, just shocking that an American might want to express his outrage against something that until yesterday was indefensibly illegal action by the government. Even more frightening is that Bill O'Reilly isn't the only one scouring the comment sections on liberal blogs to find anti-American subversives.

Hopefully, Mr. Tamm can expect better treatment than some others who undoubtedly entertain the Malkinites on the right nearly as much as they would have enjoyed lions shredding Christians and Jews in the Arena in another era:

"The Red Cross went in and got to interview these people for the first time," said Mayer on the CBS Evening News. "What these people described was hanging from the ceilings by their arms and being water-boarded, partially drowned, put on leashes and knocked into walls and basically deprived of all kinds of sensory imagery for years." [my emphasis]

They don't "hate us for our freedoms." They hate us because barbarisms have been undertaken in our names. As the conclusion of Mayer's extraordinary New Yorker article points out, my earlier lament that a government that acts outside of the law, cannot legally put the bad guys away. What made these neocons believe that they were smarter than over 200 years of constitutional tradition and centuries of democratic jurisprudence is beyond me.

NOT being an arbitrary and capricious despotic tyrany was supposedly what separated us from the likes of the Taliban and Hussein in the first place.