Monday, August 13, 2007

Challenge to a liar

From Xymphora, who begins by quoting me:
“Bad things are happening in the ‘progressive’ community. Bad things. You may not be able to see the true scope of the danger yet, but you soon will.”

This is in the context of the Cannonfire attempted defense of the indefensible Democratic Party support for the new unconstitutional FISA law. What’s on for next week – the case for torture? Being in an Empire truly makes people insane.
Response:
X, you're a fucking liar. Provably.

1. I have repeatedly said that I would have voted against the FISA update, especially because it weakens oversight. If you can cite a single instance where I have said otherwise, I'll pay you a hundred bucks. If you can't, admit that you are a liar -- using that word.

2. The Democratic Party did not support the law. The vast majority of Democrats in Congress voted against it.

3. If the law is unconstitutional (a determination to be made by a court, not by you or me), it is so only to the degree that the original FISA legislation was unconstitutional. Nothing has changed.

The minimization procedures, designed to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of what the law calls "U.S. persons," apply to foreign-to-domestic communications. If you read those procedures, you will see that those communications were intercepted without warrant in 1978, not just in 2007. I know that you have often been told otherwise, but read the 1978 law and you will learn the truth. If foreign/domestic communications were not being intercepted back then, those procedures would not even have existed in the original legislation.

Do I think that those procedures are adequate? No. In my view, they should be strengthened. But the fault was in the 1978 legislation, not in the 2007 update.
By the way, if you scroll down, you'll see that the line he quotes was not connected to the FISA legislation. The reference was in response to the bizarre suggestion that the Democrats -- not the Republicans -- committed election fraud in Ohio.

Of course, Xymphora counseled his readers to vote Republican in 2006. Seems to me that living in whatever planet he calls home has made him go insane.

I suppose some of you are busy cobbling together strained rationalizations for that. Just as X will no doubt come up with some strained rationalization to "prove" that I said something I never said.

And I'll betcha that he is yet another jackass braying his opinion on a law he never read.

(I suppose I should note that I cleaned up a grammatical point or two when I reprinted my response above.)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's the Blue Dog Dems we have to blame and remove from the Dem party. Blue Dogs SUCK!

Anonymous said...

Blue Dogs suck republican dick.
http://www.house.gov/ross/BlueDogs/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Democrats

Anonymous said...

where did x ever say to vote republican in '06? i read him regularly since '04 and can't remember anything like that. link?
-M

Joseph Cannon said...

M, how could you have missed it? The post was titled "Save America; vote Republican." And he was not being ironic.

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2006/11/save-america-vote-republican.html

Some crap about the all-powerful Jews switching their allegiances away from the Republicans, who have started to stand up heroically to the all-powerful Zionist cabal...

By the way, did you see his latest? Utterly swinish. Amazing to have my eyesight questioned by someone who so thoroughly misread my post on the "who lost Ohio" allegation.

Hyperman said...

I would suggest not loosing too much time with Mr. X. The guy is clearly a classic paranoid anti-semite who thinks the jews are responsible for all the problems on this planet. He suffers from a severe case of "tunnel vision". And the commentators on his blog are a collection of racist freaks and jesus-peddlers.

AitchD said...

How does this help elect good Democrats, or any Democrats? Isn't your mission to help elect a Democrat, like it was when you started your blog? It's unreasonable to expect your readers to read all the legislation you blog about, so it's irrational (but not unbloggy) to condemn them for being ignorant, which we happen to be about most things. But guess what? Most of us -- well, all of us except you and Gore Vidal -- lump together all those things with names like 'The Patriot Act', 'NSA', 'Military Tribunal', and 'FISA' because they've been made indistinguishable in their apparent assaults on our citizenship presumptions. Last year at this time everyone was arguing about whether you or I (as a US citizen) could be deemed an 'enemy combatant' --remember? It's cool that you can keep things straight and inform us, but you can't beat yourself up, and us, just because more information always means more ignorance, which means more confusion.

Anonymous said...

Joseph,

I went to the links to the FISA amendment that you provided and started reading them. Not finished yet, but so far...you've been right.

Sadly, the standard story remains, flying around the web and media at light speed. Bill Press has howled about how the "Dems caved". Hmmm...let's see, the majority of Dems vote against this horror, and that's called "caving"? What about the Repubs? They pretty much all went over the cliff for it. THAT is caving.

Oh, and Alexander Cockburn is back, spewing s**t in a column on Alternet about "how the Dems blew it" after eight months. I suggest you read it, but...it is guaranteed to send the blood pressure into the atmosphere. He gets it wrong in so many places that it comes across as just bad comedy.

Thanks for striving to point out the truth. It's sad that at this critical juncture we are more interesed in shooting ourselves in the head instead of taking aim at the real bad guys out there (you know, the Republicans).

Anonymous said...

Oh, this is so obviously not a fair fight, Joseph. I almost feel bad for Xymphora. He's just a wee bit out of his league.

Jonathan Versen said...

there are zero links in the main body of your post, and one incomplete one in your comments-- what exactly are you "proving?"

Joseph Cannon said...

Oh, fer chrissakes, Jonathan. I don't need to link to the latest X post because his blog is in my links list to the left, thought not for much longer. Besides, there's this thing called Google which you may want to look into...

Anonymous said...

Joseph - many thanks for the info on Xymphora advising people to vote Repuglican in 2006. I didn't know that!

His take was to give them so much rope they'd get hung (in office) on the electoral fraud issue, but it was still wrong.

I've always liked his blog (e.g. what he says about US prisons and Chomsky), despite being somewhat mystified about who he means when he refers to the US 'establishment', who he believes are standing up to Zionist money. He doesn't say nice things about them - indeed he calls them anti-Semitic scumbags. But he supports them at election time. Holding his nose or not holding his nose, it doesn't matter really.

Backing the Republicans cannot ever be justified - for reasons so patently obvious that they don't need to be repeated.

And you don't have to be pro-Democrat to realise that. Look at me, I recognise it, and I'm one of those anti-parliamentary ultras :-)

Regards,

b