After such
a 1984-esque send-up, it doesn’t even really matter
what else Obama had to say in his speech about NSA reforms and
the like. Rest assured, it was largely a pack of lies. Mind you,
Obama said it eloquently enough and interspersed it with all the
appropriately glib patriotic remarks about individual freedom
and the need to defend the Constitution and securing the life of
our nation while preserving our liberties. After all, Obama has
proven to be very good at saying one thing and doing another,
whether it’s insisting that “you can keep your health care
plan,” that he’ll close Guantanamo, or that his administration’s
controversial drone strikes only target terrorists and not
civilians.
When it
comes to the NSA, Obama has been lying to the American people
for quite some time now. There was the time he claimed the
secret FISA court is “transparent.” Then he insisted that “we
don’t have a domestic spying program.” And then, to top it all
off, he actually insisted there was no evidence the NSA was
“actually abusing” its power. As David Sirota writes for
Salon: “it has now become almost silly to insinuate or
assume that the president hasn’t also been lying. Why?
Because if that’s true — if indeed he hasn’t been
deliberately lying — then it means he has been dangerously,
irresponsibly and negligently ignorant of not only the
government he runs, but also of the news breaking around him.”