Hullabaloo

Thursday, August 06, 2009

 
Major Spying Scandal

by digby

No, not that boring old crap about warrantless wiretapping. All you people ever want to do is play the blame game and look in the rearview mirror.

This is something much worse:

ABC News’ Rick Klein was first to report, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was quite taken aback by White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips’s request that if citizens “get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy,” they “send it toflag@whitehouse.gov."

In a White House blog, Phillips said he was trying to stem the flow of “disinformation," and Linda Douglass, communications director for the White Houses Health Reform Office, appeared in a web video saying, "there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this one, take a look at this one. This one says,‘Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate Private Insurance.’

Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know, the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression."

In response,Cornyn wrote to President Obama that he’s concerned “about a new White House program to monitor American citizens' speech opposing your health care policies, and to seek your assurances that this program is being carried out in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and America's tradition of free speech and public discourse.”

The Texas Republican said it seemed “inevitable that the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House. You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program.”

And he suggested that if President Bush had “asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House,” President Obama “would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program-and I would have been at your side denouncing such heavy-handed government action. "

Asked about Cornyn's letter on Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "nobody is collecting names."

The blog and tips email was because, Gibbs said, "we have seen, and as I've discussed from this podium, a lot of misinformation around health care reform. Some of it I think spread purposely. We have used on many occasions the Web site to debunk things that are simply not true. We ask people if they have questions about health care reform and about what they're hearing about its affects on them, to let us know and we'd provide them information to show that that wasn't true."

Continued Gibbs: "but nobody is collecting names."

Awesome!

Having a hissy fit over this is the kind of political tactic in which the right specializes. They take a liberal meme --- the government spying on citizens ---- and they apply it to something trivial and transparently political. People may be conflicted and uninformed about whether or not the government can do these things for national security purposes, but the idea of the White House collecting emails of specific tea baggers is something that instantly fuels their nutball base's paranoid fantasies and makes eveyone else think there might also be something "off" about this since it's so trivial. If the Republicans had the majority, you can bet they would be launching investigations immediately. As it is, the teabaggers will make a lot of money and launch any numbers of conspiracy theories based upon this.

The truth is that this really wan't necessary for the White house to do. Tracking the disinformation is something the old country bloggers are actually pretty good at.


Update: Rush is already on it:

"Barack Obama has a snitch website. Barack Obama has a website in which he's asking for his supporters to rat out people who are spreading disinformation about health care, when in fact the only disinformation's coming from him and members of his party. Now what this essentially is, ladies and gentlemen, is Barack Obama's very own personal domestic spying program. ... I wanna know, where are all you leftist civil libertarians who were up in arms when George W. Bush was trying to catch terrorists in the act before they committed the act? The warrantless wiretap program that you said was a violation of civil liberties that, by the way, Barack Obama has expanded? Where are you today?"

Is it irresponsible to speculate that Barack Obama is using the full power of the federal government to secretly spy on tea baggers? It's irresponsible not to...

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digby 8/06/2009 01:30:00 PM |