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.)