CNN’s State of the Union (December 6, 2015) with Jake Tapper
had an amusing line up of Republican Presidential candidates as guests. The
cast included Senator Marco Rubio, Governor John Kasich, and a sound bite by
Donald Trump. The rhetoric and
contradictions were, as Trump might say, “AMAZING”! Here are the highlights:
On the San Bernadino
shooting and shooters:
Rubio: “How did these
people come up with the money to purchase all of these explosives and pipe
bombs? This was potentially thousands
of dollars in expenditures.”
Wow, “thousands!” Nationally
syndicated NPR radio talk show host, Diane Rehm, also expressed surprise the
day after the shootings, fairly shrieking on her show, “WHERE did he get all
the money for those weapons?” Yeah, who
makes that kind of money—“thousands of dollars”? That DOES sound suspicious. Is
it possible that this man who made an annual salary of $70,000, who probably
spent half of that on recurring expenses, and another quarter on taxes, leaving
him with $17,500 PER YEAR was able to to save enough money to buy “thousands of
dollars” worth of weapons?? Seems suspicious.
( I know a guy at the U.S. Coast Guard who used to brag to me in
whispers that he had 33 guns in his house and he was storing ammunition, too,
in the event of a Zombie apocalypse…or a renegade FBI raid on his home. No one has arrested him yet, though he does make one raise an eyebrow.)
On the idea of collecting
phone data to stop terrorism:
Senator Rubio practically argued that we should collect and
save a lifetime of phone records on EVERY ONE in the country. He lamented that we didn’t have phone record
information going back longer than two years on this guy and his accomplice,
his Pakistani wife. Fortunately the CNN host, Jake Tapper, had the wits to
remind Rubio that the wife had only been in the country two years, so how was the U.S. Government supposed to collect data
on her going back longer than that? Rubio’s response: “That’s why collecting this data
is so critical.” Huh? Then he doubled-down (even Rubio is learning
lessons from The Donald now) by saying if we had collected all his phone
records for years, he was sure if we went back and looked at everyone he ever called, we’d find someone who knows something that could help us figure out how this happened.
And there goes the Republican plan for “small federal government”
out the window again! How many people, how many computers, how much time will
it take to go through all of those records, find where these people now live,
interview them, etc. etc. Oh, wait, I forgot…the government will outsource that
to contractors so that the Federal
Government continues to “appear” small and limited, while its budget continues
to grow to the size of Godzilla.
But wait…I thought the terrorists were so smart that they
stopped using the standard phone system in lieu of more secure forms of
communication, like Wii and PlayStation. If that’s the case, what’s the benefit
in keeping all these phone records again?
This was the point Sen. Kasich made later in the broadcast.
Sen. Kasich: “These
folks have been able to encrypt their messages. We know that was the case in
Paris and we suspect it was the case here (San Bernadino) and our intelligence
communities cannot see those communications.
If we can’t see what they’re saying, then we’re operating in the dark.”
But under the Rubio plan, we won’t have to.
We’ll have a bazillion terabytes of un-encrypted phone data to crawl through.
Okay, so which is it, guys? Are the terrorists talking on open phone lines or via
encrypted PlayStation toggles? We might
want to get this one right going forward.
On using the terror
watch list or “no-fly” list to check on potential gun buyers:
Like many of his Republican colleagues, Rubio is against
using these lists to check on individuals who try to buy a gun in this country. When he
was asked on the show about his position, Rubio replied that this wouldn’t be a good idea
because “the majority of the people who
are on the no-fly list are oftentimes
people who basically just have the
same name as somebody else, who don’t belong on the no-fly list. They wind up
on the no-fly list, there’s no due process, and no way to get your name removed
from it on a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment
right being impeded upon.” But it’s okay
to keep them in the dark that they’re on the list?? AND it’s okay to keep a
record of everyone they ever called on the phone. Those aren’t infringements on
anyone’s rights, apparently. Many Republicans who have been asked about this, including Sen. Rubio, have stated that former Senator Ted Kennedy was on one of these lists. Don't you think HE'D want to know. (Sshh, no! He'll never find out...we'll just tell him he can't board the plane, Sorry, Mr. Senator.)
And here’s what’s more disturbing, he continued by stating, “There
are over 700,000 Americans on some watch list or another that would all be
captured under this amendment that the Democrats offered. There aren’t 700,000 terrorists operating in
America openly on watch lists. That is not a perfect database and it has a
significant number of errors.” (But if
it does include the most dangerous individuals, wouldn’t we want to use it?
Ahem, and, if the list has that many law-abiding citizens on it, maybe someone in the Federal Government might want to clean that list
up? I’m just sayin’…)
But wait, it gets better when Gov. Kasich weighs in on this
one. In the most bizarre twist of logic
heard in a long, long time, Gov. Kasich, on this topic, posited the following
argument for not using the lists:
“In our state, when we
stop someone who’s on the watch list, we don’t tell them they’re on the watch
list. We want to make sure that we can
exploit all the information that we can possibly get. So if all of the sudden
you tell everybody who’s on the watch list, ‘You can’t do this or that’, then
guess what happens? We lose our ability to track. We lose our ability to gather
information. Of course it makes common sense to say that if you’re on a terrorist
watch list, we don’t want them to be able to buy a gun. But what we have to
deal with is the fact that we don’t want to tip somebody off that they’re under
review and we could be gathering critical information to disrupt the plot. All
of this is about having the information to disrupt. That’s what the intelligence
business is all about.”
The savvy CNN Host was right on top of that one again,
asking somewhat incredulously: “Let me
just game this out. So somebody’s on the terror watch list, and so they’re
being surveilled; they go in to buy an AR-15, and you think that that person
should be able to get it, because you don’t want to tip them off that they’re
on a terror watch list?
Kasich: “Well, what I think, Jake, is I think we
have to be careful in the way we do this. Look everybody wants to get a slick
little answer and a hundred percent answer. If there is a practical way to
limit it, yes. But I think we also have to weigh it off against our ability to
surveil.” In the end, Kasich
admitted, “Presidential campaigns don’t
always lend themselves to reasonable discussions. “ AMEN!
(WARNING: POTENTIAL BRILLIANT IDEA: So why wouldn’t this work: when someone goes to buy a gun,
we check their name against the watch lists and if there’s a match, we let them
buy the gun and then inform the appropriate authorities afterward. That way we
protect everyone’s 2nd Amendment right AND afterward, if the Government
is on the ball, they’ll do something with the information like, for example, they
see it’s the twelfth gun purchased by that individual in as many months. Seems
reasonable, no? And since Rubio and Kasich don’t have any problem with the
Government collecting our phone records, it shouldn’t bother them if the
Government collects our gun purchase records either, right? Everyone can get what they want…including the
terrorist gun buyer. Now that’s our constitutional democracy working for us!)
And then there’s
Trump:
We’ll end with the broadcast’s opener--a provocative
statement by Donald Trump giving his, as always, deeply profound and informed
insight into why President Obama won’t say the term “radical Islamic terrorism”. Trump proclaimed, “There’s something going on with him that
we…don’t…know about.”
Which is basically what everyone is muttering under their breath
about Trump himself and now, after this broadcast perhaps, about a couple of
his Republican competitors.
