Bite my shiny hypocritical ass
So Sarah Palin starts stonewalling the investigators in Alaska who are looking into her abuse of power there, and McCain's people in DC take over the PR and legal offensive on this thing, with the obvious intention to just stall it out until after the election. In the process of doing all of this, it comes out that (like the Bush White House) Sarah Palin may have been conducting official business on a personal Yahoo account, presumably as a way of getting around subpoena laws in Alaska. That's how Bush got around them, anyway. And then, as a capper, she refused to turn over her e-mails to investigators, citing, in her best GWB impression, "executive privilege". Can you feel the Mavericky "change" just shooting through your bones??
So, some enterprising hackers hilariously broke into her "sub legal" Yahoo accounts and got everything.
I'll just go ahead and quote a few paragraphs from Greenwald, since you know I'm gonna agree with everything he says anyway. And, I should note, he really seems to be having fun with this one. He might have written this one standing up, dancing around the room to big band music with a drink in his hand. The past year of blogging about privacy issues has led to this glorious rampage:
The available evidence strongly suggests the hacker is loosely part of an assorted band of Internet pranksters ranging from the juvenile to the psychopathic. Conventional political agendas ("Vote Obama!") don't exactly appear to be their interest. Either way, whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.
Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.
The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.
And the same Surveillance State Worshipper leading today's screeching -- Michelle Malkin -- spent the last several years deriding those who objected to the President's illegal spying program as "privacy crusaders" and "constitutional absolutists" and "civil liberties absolutists".
Shouldn't these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide? If Sarah Palin isn't committing crimes or consorting with The Terrorists, then why would she care if we can monitor her emails?
It goes on and on and on and it's great. It's like Carlos Santana on mescaline. He's having a great time.
And the funny thing is, the difference between Sarah Palin being hacked and a journalist or activist being monitored, is that Sarah Palin actually broke the law. And the argument goes around "You Leftists would be furious if this was Barack Obama", and sure. But I'd be even more furious if Obama was involved in some horrible executive scandal and started stonewalling the feds.
Because that's Neocon shit, man. Like, it'd be like asking me if I'd be upset about Obama raising taxes on the middle class, giving tax cuts to the rich, throwing out environmental regulations, and declaring war on Lebanon. Yes, I would be mad, and also he would be a Republican, so yeah this little thought experiment dies pretty quickly.
For the record, I don't like at all that Gawker and HuffPo posted screenshots of her e-mails. I think that's really creepy. The idea of vigilante (or apolitical "fuck it all") hackers subverting the law to subvert a politician who's subverting a law: that's hilarious. But posting pictures of somebody's grandkids or whatever is just awful.
Anyway, oh hilarious. Remember, it's A-OK for the government to break into your e-mails and spy on you and keep secret records of you that it's illegal to even ask about, but if some random idiot on 4chan guesses that "caribou" is your Yahoo password it's THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.
So, some enterprising hackers hilariously broke into her "sub legal" Yahoo accounts and got everything.
I'll just go ahead and quote a few paragraphs from Greenwald, since you know I'm gonna agree with everything he says anyway. And, I should note, he really seems to be having fun with this one. He might have written this one standing up, dancing around the room to big band music with a drink in his hand. The past year of blogging about privacy issues has led to this glorious rampage:
The available evidence strongly suggests the hacker is loosely part of an assorted band of Internet pranksters ranging from the juvenile to the psychopathic. Conventional political agendas ("Vote Obama!") don't exactly appear to be their interest. Either way, whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.
Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.
The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.
And the same Surveillance State Worshipper leading today's screeching -- Michelle Malkin -- spent the last several years deriding those who objected to the President's illegal spying program as "privacy crusaders" and "constitutional absolutists" and "civil liberties absolutists".
Shouldn't these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide? If Sarah Palin isn't committing crimes or consorting with The Terrorists, then why would she care if we can monitor her emails?
It goes on and on and on and it's great. It's like Carlos Santana on mescaline. He's having a great time.
And the funny thing is, the difference between Sarah Palin being hacked and a journalist or activist being monitored, is that Sarah Palin actually broke the law. And the argument goes around "You Leftists would be furious if this was Barack Obama", and sure. But I'd be even more furious if Obama was involved in some horrible executive scandal and started stonewalling the feds.
Because that's Neocon shit, man. Like, it'd be like asking me if I'd be upset about Obama raising taxes on the middle class, giving tax cuts to the rich, throwing out environmental regulations, and declaring war on Lebanon. Yes, I would be mad, and also he would be a Republican, so yeah this little thought experiment dies pretty quickly.
For the record, I don't like at all that Gawker and HuffPo posted screenshots of her e-mails. I think that's really creepy. The idea of vigilante (or apolitical "fuck it all") hackers subverting the law to subvert a politician who's subverting a law: that's hilarious. But posting pictures of somebody's grandkids or whatever is just awful.
Anyway, oh hilarious. Remember, it's A-OK for the government to break into your e-mails and spy on you and keep secret records of you that it's illegal to even ask about, but if some random idiot on 4chan guesses that "caribou" is your Yahoo password it's THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.