Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, April 20, 2004

One tool that has been especially important to law enforcement is called a roving wiretap. Roving wiretaps allow investigators to follow suspects who frequently change their means of communications. These wiretaps must be approved by a judge, and they have been used for years to catch drug dealers and other criminals. Yet, before the Patriot Act, agents investigating terrorists had to get a separate authorization for each phone they wanted to tap. That means terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone. The Patriot Act fixed the problem by allowing terrorism investigators to use the same wiretaps that were already being using against drug kingpins and mob bosses.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, April 20, 2004

The Patriot Act helps us defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all Americans. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, or to track his calls, or to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of the tools we're talking about. And they are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

--George W. Bush, President of the United States, July 20, 2005:

Why don't we hear about this shit on in the mainstream media. Remember when Clinton was impeached? You couldn't watch a newscast without hearing his quote, "I did not have sex with that woman." Clearly the stakes here are far higher. We're talking about a President's pecker versus our civil liberties. No contest, right?

When you're talking about an essentially disconnected country, where 4 out of ten eligible voters don't even bother to show up for presidential elections, that gets the bulk of its news from the National Enquirer, US magazine or, if we're lucky, the Daily Show, is going to be far more interested, and the media is going to get substantially higher ratings, when following reportage about sex versus the erosion of civil liberties and the abuse of presidential power, which for most of America, might as well be reports of the movements of glaciers.

I even know from the response I get on this site, that people don't want to read about politics. Don't want to comment on it, don't want to discuss it, don't want to think about it. But if I post something funny about one of my cats, they are all over it. Unscientific, I know, but it suggests a larger apathy that afflicts this country and which conservatives who are anything but apathetic exploit in every day in every way.

Beyond that, the media in this country has been cowed so effectively by the conservatives who have been "working the refs" shouting "liberal bias" at the top of their lungs for 30 years to the point that people in the media are so afraid to be appear non-biased that they bend over backwards to appear objective, but in doing so, they give voice to absurdist arguments made by conservatives to throw sand in the eyes of the American people and obfuscate the truth. It makes it impossible to have a real debate about anything in this country.