An alternative view from a “lackey butt-kissing shit”

[muriel_volestrangler]

37. It's pretty obvious that 'shit' refers to behaviour, not a person

As in "don't give me that shit", "I'm getting too old for this shit", and so on. It's in the singular; if you think it refers to a person, then it refers to only one person ("the shit&quot , and there's no reason whatsoever to think it refers to you. Personally, I was completely unaware you're a BOG host, and I have not noticed you as the most prominent defender of the president either - before or after the NSA scandal. Sorry if you think you're the most important one.

If it referred to one person, then that one person would have had to have left DU for the post to make any sense. Clearly you haven't; I don't know of any notable Pres. Obama defenders who had left shortly before that post. So it referred to the general DU behaviour; the poster thought that we had been, collectively, kissing butt. Obviously what's happened recently is not a change in everyone's attitude, but the poster likes that some are not. It's a point of view (I wouldn't say it's automatically a good thing, but in this case I do like to see some DUers opposing the line of the top Dems).

On your points about surveillance:

If you make a cash transfer of even $ 100 through a bank it is now recorded and added to a financial data base. If you drive within 100 miles of the Southern US border you will pass through check points and your cars details will enter a data base. If you cross a US border your movements are added to a data base, and so on.

The government doesn’t use these data bases for surveillance, and they are not opening up a personal file on you.

Are you sure? They have all your phone records, after all. There's good reason to think that international transactions are all tracked (there's no physical audit trail, and the auditors are the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, for whom the DNI used to work, and who get their money from the government). Given that so much that has been going on has been in secret, I think it's premature to say the government isn't doing something, until we have independent evidence (remember, James Clapper, that DNI who is an ex-BAH VP, lied to Congress about what the government collects - we can't take their word for it any more).

And this is, I think, the fundamental problem: Obama has a Director of National Intelligence who lies to Congress, has been shown to lie to Congress, and Obama has done nothing at all about removing him. He seems happy to leave untrustworthy people in charge of a huge surveillance program, and just say "we need a conversation about this", while moving heaven and earth to catch the man who revealed the document that proved Clapper is a lying piece of shit. This means you can no longer trust the word of anyone in the government, even when they're appearing in front of Congress. How many more Clappers are still in the government?