Is There a Political Voyeur in the Bush Administration? Four Questions to Ask the White House

"President Bush said Saturday that senators who are blocking renewal of the terrorism-fighting Patriot Act are acting irresponsibly and standing in the way of protecting the country from attack," reports AP this Saturday morning.

'In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment,' the president said in a live broadcast from the White House of his weekly radio address."

AP did not report if the President was smiling (or his trademark smirking) when he uttered this ironic remark.

The Democratic-led bipartisan Senate coalition that blocked a four-year extension of 16 expiring provisions of the Patriot Act offered a three-month extension to protect the American public while the Senate studies the Act to determine a proper constitutional balance between personal privacy rights and civil rights, and necessary national security precautions.

The Republican response? Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, on behalf of President Bush, childishly refused to extend the Patriot Act for three months, thereby leaving US citizens unprotected....and nakedly placing politics over public safety.

I suppose the Bush Administration's hope, once again, is to scare and intimidate the American public into accepting his paranoid, privacy-invading worldview. (He must have been smirking this morning when he snarked "...we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.")

Also in today's weekly address, the President openly acknowledged, the widely reported story that " President Bush has personally authorized a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official said Friday night. "

Apparently the President ignored one legal requisite to violating our rights to privacy: a search warrant and/or judicial permission. Huffed an exasperated Senator Arlen Specter (R-PN),chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee , "There is no doubt that this is inappropriate."

Here's my question.....What is it with this White House and its insatiable snooping on everyday Americans? From family phone calls and personal cell phone use to library, medical and credit card records, they take every conceivable opportunity, and go to extraordinary lengths, to peep into the tiniest details of our private lives. The results of all that expensive eavesdropping are virtually 100 percent useless to the federal government.

Does someone prominent in the Bush Administration have politically-tinged voyeuristic yearnings? Or is this just in-your-Constitutional-face smirk fodder for the Bush White House?

Seriously, we will understand why this White House vigorously pursues such snooping on millions of obviously innocent Americans by answering four questions:

--- Who can benefit from this massive data accumulation about us?
--- How is the data being used?
--- Who is performing, and getting paid for, all this privacy invasion?
--- Was any of this in-depth prying into the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans outsourced to Bush's Republican-donor corporate buddies?
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Related Articles
-- Bipartisan Senate Coalition Stops Patriot Act Renewal
-- Read the full text of today's presidential weekly radio address at About.com's Guide to US Government Info, by Robert Longley: Bush Defends Eavesdropping, Patriot Act
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