The Credibility of No Such Agency

Let me see if I get this straight...

According to General Micheal Hayden, the Deputy DNI, the Presiden't illegal wiretap program...

"is not a drift net over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont, grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused."

Well that's reassuring.

Except, this is the NSA. We should believe this is General Hayden trotting out anything other than an official public denial of the existence of a classified intelligence gathering operation? Um, why? Because he's just such swell guy?

When Donald Rumsfeld told us that Congress could pull the plug on Total Information Awareness but it wouldn't stop him from secretly mining electronic message networks, did anyone else think he was serious?

Apparently not. Kevin Drum [here and here] as well as Comrade Joshua [here] and Matthew Yglesias [here], seem to be eating this up with a spoon.

I just love these "serious" moderate Democrats. They're oh so happy to rail about the lies and the lying liars who tell them [apologies to Al Franken], but only after they've got egg on their faces for credulously believing the lies in the first place. I keep asking: at what point will these supercilious and self-righteous bastards wake up and stop giving these people the credibility they desperately need to keep perpetuating the bullshit?

And the thing about the "serious" moderate Democrats that really pisses me off is how useless they really are most of the time. If you're a conservatarian GOP running-dog imperialist goon, you have to be thinking to yourself: who the fsck needs Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum and Big Media Matt to help out with hammering home the narrative? We've got the entire top-down media on our side, and these small-beer players are just not playing their weight class!

For the record: No, I don't believe a word of General Hayden's bullshit. The man is a professional liar. If his natural impulse was to tell the truth to the press, then I doubt he could have been hired to clean the toilets at the NSA, much less serve as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

Update 1.0: I was right to be suspicious. Glenn Greenwald tells us how full of shit General Hayden was when he said that "probable cause" was the issue with FISA compliance.