There was FBI Director James Comey testifying on Capitol Hill this week peddling two stories to the nation – that there's an active investigation of possible Russian collusion with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign to interfere in the election and that there is "no evidence" to suggest Trump was, as he has alleged, "wiretapped" coinciding with that probe.
I don't mean to be too disrespectful to Comey, but his testimony was little more than carefully parsed, credibility-challenged, meaningless hokum and official disinformation.
When Trump tweeted weeks ago that his campaign headquarters had been "wiretapped" by Barack Obama, I think most Americans knew what he meant. He didn't mean Obama broke into his offices and personally planted electronic eavesdropping devices on his land-line phones. That's not the way surveillance is conducted in the 21st century. It's not the way presidents get things done. It's not even the way it was done back in 1972 during the Watergate scandal.
What most people intuitively understood Trump's charge to mean in the vernacular was that Obama had directed or approved or winked at or had knowledge of efforts by his law enforcement and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the opposition party's presidential nominee during a heated and highly contested election campaign like some tin-pot dictator in a Third World banana republic.
And I have no doubts Trump was right.
In the same spirit, Obama oversaw the abuse of the most feared agency in the U.S. government, the Internal Revenue Service, to harass and probe and hinder taxpayers and nonprofits with dissenting political views during his presidency.
In the same spirit, Obama oversaw the "wiretapping" of Fox News correspondent James Rosen, the Associated Press and other journalists during his presidency.
In the same spirit, Obama oversaw the National Security Agency's massive bugging operation of every citizen and non-citizen in the U.S.
I could go on and on listing the unconstitutional, un-American abuses that took place during Obama's eight years in office – along with many of his predecessors.
So, isn't it just a little disingenuous that all these public officials are looking around at each other with these what-me-wiretap expressions on their faces and lips?
At the end of the day, aren't all Americans being "bugged" in one form or another? Isn't that what Americans learned so recently through the NSA scandal?
I recently got confirmation that the NSA had surveillance files on me as early as the Clinton administration years at the very start-up of this very first independent online news service you are reading right now.
It's simply naïve and childish to pretend the U.S. government doesn't do these things with the active oversight, permission and even direction of presidents.
I've been there. I've experienced it firsthand. I've paid the price. I've had my taxes audited for political reasons. I've seen the notes on the surveillance trail of the NSA and other government snoops.
It's about time we grew up and recognize the simple fact that we've been living in a surveillance state and a creeping police state subject to widespread political abuse – even while this Deep State bureaucracy ignores many direct national security threats for its own political reasons and welcomes with open arms and subsidizes tens of thousands of "refugees" and other unidentifiable potential national security threats into the homeland.
It's time to grow up and stop playing pretend.
That Donald Trump, who represents the gravest threat to this entrenched Deep State status quo, is and was somehow overlooked by this scarcely secretive Big Brother apparatus is a joke, childish and preposterous.
If I didn't escape its peering, intrusive attention, how could Trump?
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