Lie to Us, Please!

I hope Barack Obama is up to no good. I hope and pray that his first order of business in the early hours of his administration will be to undo what I hope is just a good old-fashioned political ploy. Please tell me he’s lying to us right now! How I hope he is insincere and calculating.

I’m going to make believe for a moment: I am President Obama’s chief policy advisor. It is January 20, 2009 and the President and his family are preparing for his inauguration. Michelle is adjusting his tie and his daughters are playing Wii in the background. The Vice President elect just called and asked when we would be headed down to the ceremony. CNN is showing a live feed of Chief Justice Roberts arriving with his wife.

Michelle Obama gathers the girls and their coats and heads out of the room, leaving the President-elect and me alone. As I brush off his lapel and hand him his coat, he looks deep into my eyes like he never has before, “what’s first, Mick?” Surprised by such a big, broad question as we were essentially walking out the door, I figure this might be the only truly private moment I ever have with the man. “You have to undo the FISA bill, sir.” He breaks his stare and glances to the ground with a small chuckle. “That’s done. That was the plan all along. I meant, now. What’s the first part of this process today? Are we going to the car now? What?”

I could actually go on and on with that little role play, but it effectively makes my case for what I hope Barack Obama is planning with regard to FISA. His shift in position in joining the congressional caving in on one of the most obscene and profoundly anti-American bills of our time has been stuck with me like a sliver of rancid meat wedged between my teeth.

Most Americans who truly value the liberties and freedoms that have to this point, been a birth-right, are feeling the same disorientation with Obama’s shift to the center. While a shift to the middle is usually a good political move during a campaign, there are simply some issues on which such a move is a bad idea. A shift to “the middle” on FISA is not a shift to the center at all. Anything specifically protected in the Constitution doesn’t offer any wiggle room when it comes to right and left or right and wrong.

Taking a calculated risk on FISA as a presidential candidate could be debated, I suppose. However in the end, it makes no sense to abandon position on an issue that tragically most Americans know nothing about. When I bring up FISA in casual conversation with friends almost no one knows what it is. That is scary! When I break it down and explain that the Bush administration has been paying telecommunications companies for the access to the phone calls and emails of private citizens, the first response is usually, “he can do that?!” There is the seed of the point. No, he cannot do that. Nor can congress pass a bill giving the President authority to do so without warrants or court orders. It is unconstitutional. Illegal.

So what is to be gained politically by such a move? Am I to believe that more than 10% of the coal miners in West Virginia or Pennsylvania factory workers know anything about FISA? To whom is the Obama campaign pandering? Southern whites? Most of them would scurry to have their children removed from Obama’s soccer team if they showed up to the first day of practice and saw his brown face. The only Americans who care anything about FISA are the Bush administration and any self-respecting Democrat. Obama has them. The choice was essentially made to take his base for granted. He’s going to win them anyway. McCain has done the same thing with Evangelicals. He knows they’ll never vote for a pro-choice black man with a sassy wife who seems arrogantly into book learning.

What has been removed by FISA is the idea of probable cause. Even the most disinterested and moronically content fool understands probable cause. A cop can’t pull you over just because you have a Black Sabbath sticker on your car and the federal government cannot listen to your phone calls because nineteen Saudis knocked down a couple buildings seven years ago. These are the freedoms that George Bush insists that over 4000 young Americans have died for. In fact Iraq and Afghanistan have never threatened any freedom that any of us hold dear and protect. President Bush is the only one threatening such freedom. He and his gang of goons are the only ones taking anything from us. They are the ones who “hate us for our freedom.”

Equally complicit has been the sad and utterly ineffective US congress. When Democrats became the majority in 2006, I thought without pause that the Bush administration would be stopped in their tracks with regard to the reeling back of such liberties. I was wrong. Proving that they have no idea what to do when they get the ball, Congressional Democrats began a predictable and regular rolling over to Bush’s fear mongering, becoming Tina Turner to Bush’s Ike.

Thus far, the ACLU is the only public entity to stand up in collective outrage for this bill. They have filed a lawsuit to prevent the implementation of the law. A full page ad for support of the bill ran in Thursday’s New York Times.

For supporters of Barack Obama, his shift in support of the bill; something he and other Democrats called a compromise, represented the first time he let us down. Our wonderful husband was home at 2am with lipstick on his collar. After his shift he insisted that it was a reasonable compromise, furthering and deepening the hole he was digging. This bill is a compromise in the same way that meth is compromise to cocaine.

My hope is very simple: that Senator Obama has no intention of standing by his support of the FISA “compromise”. My prayer (yes, prayer! As in ‘God, please!!!) is that he is lying to us right now and intends to join the fight to dismantle this atrocity soon after taking office. At least it will be an admirable lie, unlike the one he supports currently.