Bush Calls Domestic Spy Program 'Limited'...

Yeah, it's limited. Limited to anyone and everyone he wants to spy on.

"Only people who I feel like spying on will be spyed upon. That's what I call a limited program. Alberto, John Yoo, you guys are doing one heck uv a job! Now I gots to go clear some brush..."



President Bush strongly defended his domestic spying program on Sunday, calling it legal as well as vital to thwarting terrorist attacks, and contended the leak making it public had caused "great harm to the nation."

"See, it's totally legal. I am the President, so anything I do is legal. I could kill everyone in this goddamn room right now, and John Yoo assures me, that would be totally 100% legal. Now, I'm not going to, because I had a big lunch and I don't feel like it right now. But I just want you to know...It's on the table. I could bomb Iran and Syria, kill every motherfucker in here, go clear some brush and then rape an entire elementary school class while teaching them Intelligent Design, and because I am President and we are at war, that would be totally legal. Or so my counsel have assured me. Now, seriously, this brush needs some attention. It's getting all up in my bizness, and I can't have that."

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America and, I repeat, limited," Bush told reporters after visiting wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center. "I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking."

He repeated it, folks. Okay? Are you satisfied? I mean, come on, what's it going to take. He said it was limited, and then he repeated it. I, for one, am mullified. The lesson we've learned from all this - sometimes you have to repeat yourself in order to better catapult the propaganda.

So, basically, Bush has been caught doing something clearly illegal, and is now trying to downplay it and make it seem less illegal. "Well, yeah, technically, I was wiretapping domestic communication without a court order. Which is illegal. But it was only incoming calls! And it was only from people we think might have maybe once been sort of affiliated possibly with al-Qaeda or some other group that sounds like al-Qaeda, like the Kiwanis Club or rock group The Alkaline Trio!"

(Actually, now that I think about it it, I've long suspected emo scenesters The Alkaline Trio to be secretly anti-American.)

The part where it gets typically Bushian - by which I mean retardedly stupid and annoyingly deceptive in an obvious fashion - is here:

The Justice Department on Friday opened an investigation into the leak that resulted in news stories about the secret order to eavesdrop on Americans with suspected ties to terrorists.

"The fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States," Bush said before returning to Washington from a holiday break at his Texas ranch. "There's an enemy out there."

Okay, class, let's have a brief little mini-civics lesson here. An enemy is someone who finds out secret government information and then blabs about it to some foreign organization or nation that means us harm. A whistle-blower is someone who finds out about an illegal operation going on in secret wtihin the government and tells the media.

I will provide you with another example. Scooter Libby, or possibly Dick Cheney or Karl Rove or someone else, committed an enemy action when they revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent in an attempt to smear her husband. No corruption was going on that needed to be aired publicly - they were just trying to get revenge on someone making them look bad. Ian Fishback, on the other hand, is a whistle-blower who refused to blindly accept policy, and told the world about Americans torturing suspected terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. Easy, right?

So, what Bush means is, there's an enemy of his out there. I see nothing wrong at all with a newspaper running a story about the President of the United States violating the Constitution and current U.S. law by secretly wiretapping his own citizens. It's almost...whaddya call it...oh, yeah, the patriotic duty of the free press.

Ther est of the article is Bush's usual duplicitous blather, and I'm not going to waste your time pointing out how obviously dumb it is. You're smart, you can do that on your own. It's particularly amusing seeing him try to dodge the fact that, just last year, he lied to everyone about government wiretaps, assuring everyone that he would always get a court order before tapping someone's phone:

The president denied misleading the public during a 2004 appearance in support of the Patriot Act when he said, "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, a wiretap requires a court order."

Asked about that Sunday, Bush said: "I was talking about roving wire taps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA program. The NSA program is a necessary program."

Oh, he was talking about roving wiretaps. I see. Or maybe he wasn't. He believes he was speaking about roving wire taps. This is totally different. Now, seriously, really, no more delays, this brush is getting severely out of hand...