Oh, give me a break. The NSA isn't spying on anyone's actual phone calls; they're just keeping track of what calls go to where to see if any phone calls go to al-Qaida suspects.
Been reading the New York Times? Abu Ghraib was a rare, minor incident. It was an isolated exception. It was a terrible thing, but guess what? Did you know the people responsible got...PROSECUTED???? Because that wasn't the official...POLICY????
And we haven't been torturing anyone. Abu Ghraib was NOTHING compared to Saddam Hussein's torture.
What I find disturbing is that no one is shocked any more about Cuba's gulags, or Saddam's torture chambers, or the Taliban's brutal treatment of the Afghan people. Or the secret concentration camps in North Korea. We don't care anymore. And people say that America is worse than all them! What a joke!
Well I hate to break it to you but this started long before 911, the data miners at the network interconnects were initially installed under the Clinton administration.
And when the EFF filed suit to stop the violation of OUR civil rights the government stepped in and used an english common law that was never created by our elective representatives to squash that suit. Oh and this just isn't your number, my number and how long we talked. This is every word you ever posted on the internet tagged to YOU, not your nym, YOU because everything you posted was tagged with your internet address and matched up to your billing account. The amount of data in the hawkeye database alone is staggering, the black boxes at the internet connects are next-gen super computing technology it's the dirty tricks division of google.
OK even assuming our all conservative government can handle all this power repsonsibly you realize that eventually the pendulum will swing back and if not Hillary dictating how this stuff is used, someone of her ilk. You really think it's ok for Ol Ted Kennedy to be able to flip a switch and know instantly everything you have ever done on the internet and everyone you ever talked to on the phone? (Unless you're on quest who told the feds to take a flying leap)
Anyway, People don't say America is worse than all of them. People, the good ones anyway, say America SHOULD be better them.
Right now we're not.
America doesn't run gulags, America doesn't send people to secret prisons to be tortured, our government doesn't spy on its own citizens in a scene right out of communist east germany. We have super heros to fight the evil which perpretrate these crimes.
Tell me how ANY of this fits in with the American dream or Conservative ideology.