David McElroy

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.

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What if you spent your whole life trying to alert people to something you knew would upset them, but when they finally did hear the message, they shrugged and said, “So what?”

Surely that’s the way some libertarians are going to start feeling as they realize that the NSA snooping scandal isn’t actually a scandal to most people. Many libertarians I know have spent years of their lives dedicated to spreading the word that the government is abusing the rights of the people.

“If people only understand what the government is doing to us, they’ll join us and vote the statists out of office,” many of them believed.

It turns out that the majority of Americans approve of the NSA snooping. That’s right. Not only aren’t they ready to rise up against oppressive Big Brother, they’re rather happy — because they think Big Brother is keeping them safe.

According to a new poll done last week by Pew Research — after the NSA online and phone spying stories came out — 56 percent of Americans think it’s just fine and dandy for the feds to monitor the phone calls of millions of Americans. Almost half of people of people said it’s OK for the federal government to review our emails, too. That’s been consistent over the past decade, because 45 percent approved of it in 2012 and 45 percent approved of it in last week’s poll.

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I didn’t grow up knowing much about Muslims. If you grew up in the United States (or most places in the West), odds are very strong that you didn’t know much about Muslims, either. I’ve discovered that most Muslims know just as little about us as we know about them. That doesn’t stop many people on both sides from hating each other with a passion, though.

For many people who become active in terror groups today, a radical version of the Islamic faith is a motivating factor. Some of those people come to hate those of any other faith. They’re willing to kill other people in the name of destroying anyone who doesn’t bow before their version of God.

As a result, some people in the West — some who claim to be faithful Christians and others who are just nominally or culturally Christian — have decided that all Muslims are evil. This makes no more sense than being robbed by a red-haired man and deciding that all red-haired men must be evil.

On Facebook Saturday night, one of my “friends” posted the following:

Muslims can all go to hell. They are evil bastards. There are no good Muslims, just good dead Muslims. I am a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, and I have never flown a plane into a building or bombed anyone in my life.

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