‘Can you trust this administration?’ No, but I don’t trust any president

By David McElroy · June 11, 2013

The NSA snooping mess isn’t enough to get Team Red and Team Blue to quit fighting each other. They remind me of rival gangs fighting for control of a sinking ship rather than working to keep the ship from sinking.

You might have thought this would be a non-partisan scandal. After all, the policy that the NSA is pursuing is clearly the same one that the government pursued under George W. Bush. Both administrations have pushed the boundaries of what it can do to snoop on people — in the name of security, of course.

But instead of acknowledging that we’re dealing with a crisis over a government that’s out of control in violating the rights of Americans, many politicians are more concerned with supporting their team than in dealing with the fundamental issues.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is a perfect example. McCaul is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and he doesn’t see a problem with the government collecting this information. He told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that he just doesn’t trust Team Blue with the information.

“The optics are terrible in this case when you consider the recent scandals,” McCaul said. “You have to ask yourself this question: Can you trust this administration with your phone records?”

That makes it clear what his issue with the snooping is — not whether government having your records is acceptable, but just whether the Obama administration can be trusted. He made that clear by saying the the newly revealed surveillance programs are “lawful” and helpful in fighting terrorists.

So if there’s no problem with the program and it’s perfectly legitimate for the federal government to be snooping in the records of millions of Americans who aren’t even suspected of crimes, which side is he on? How can this man find the hutzpah to defend the program, but attack the man who’s behind the “lawful” program?

There’s a lot I could say about the whole issue of the PRISM program and the wide net cast in grabbing the Verizon records, but most of it has already been said by others. If you didn’t assume these sorts of things were going on, that seems naive to me. And if you did assume these sorts of things were going on, how much more can we say about why it’s wrong to allow government spooks to have unfettered access to your digital life.

I only want to point to the hypocrisy of people such as the conservative Republican McCaul and his counterparts on the progressive left.

Both sides of the mainstream are disgustingly hypocritical when it comes to this issue. Many Republicans who were supporters of any kind of surveillance that the Bush administration did then are screaming in protest now. Why? Because it’s the Obama administration doing it, of course.

And if this same scandal had happened during the Bush administration, Democrats would have been demonstrating in front of the White House, but they’re pretty quiet right now. The people who were willing to do anything to fight for their sacred civil rights when they were threatened by a Republican administration have mostly gone silent now that it’s a Democratic administration doing it.

Some people are intellectually consistent and principled, but I find that most are very hypocritical. People are very good at finding a way to say, “Well, that’s different,” when it’s the guy from their party who’s doing something that they would protest if it were done by the other party.

The problem isn’t Team Red or Team Blue. They certainly don’t trust each other, but the real question is why anyone would trust either of them. The problem is an oppressive government taking more and more power. The Republicans and Democrats arguing about it are like two different factions of a dictatorial ruling Establishment Party arguing over who gets to be in charge this year.

Until you accept that it’s the system at fault — not just who’s in charge of the White House — you’re going to keep being fooled about what’s really going on.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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