"My natural inclination is to support and trust the President, but I must say, if Clinton were doing this exact thing under the exact same circumstances, I just know we'd be completely outraged."
Clinton did do it, as did Bush Senior, Reagan and Carter. The left is making this out to be a wiretapping debate which it isn't.
Call you an old fool instead, since you cannot see the difference between "Big brother" and intelligence operations against Foreign Foes. Once those citizens started acting as agents of Al Qeda, they switched from being members of, to enemies of, our civil society.
I understand your feelings but support this President, he does have integrity - there are many in this country working with others outside of our borders to see America terrorized. So far we have dodged another 'bullet 'by the timely and “wall-less” Patriot Act.
Somehow, that word has come to mean "giving the government as much power as they want to 'protect' me from the dreaded terrorists - and agreeing with every pronouncement the government makes about their need for yet another expansion of power." I guess there are a lot of words that could be applied to that approach, but 'conservative' ain't one of them.
I don't think I would be outraged if Clinton had "tapped" only the international communications of those contacted by, or who had contacted known foreign enemies, at a time when Congress had authorized Use of Force against those same enemies, in what amounted to a declaration of war upon them, in all but name. There are exceptions to the general rule that to be reasonable a search must be done with a warrant. This is one of them, IMHO. The Constitutional requirement is only for "reasonable" not, "with warrant" searches.
Clinton of course did far more than that, and without any such Congressional authorization.
"Call me old school, but I don't like the idea of big brother, no matter how much I like current leaders."
No, you would rather not do anything to protect us and get your butt blown up. Choices? Think!
Huh? Toon and Algore did the same thing E-SPY HYPOCRISY - where was the outrage from either side. Toon and Gore were doing it for political purposes, which should have produced plenty of outrage, whereas Bush is doing it to protect us.