Obama’s tip line is probably illegal, but so is removing it
August 8th, 2009 by Rightwing Czar at 10:25 amThere’s a wonderful little gem coming out of Fox News today about how Obama’s “tip line” – where loyal Obama followers can report healthcare naysayers to the White House – is probably illegal. But it gets better! Not only is probably illegal, but getting rid of it is too!
“The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday.
“There’s also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can’t try to rewrite history by pretending it didn’t receive anything,” he said.
“If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute.”
Whoops. Who knew that encouraging citizens to report each other for disagreeing might cause some, er, problems?
I’ve been away for the last week and haven’t really had the opportunity to blog since all of this tip line nonsense began. Plenty has been said across the blogosphere and elsewhere about Obama’s new snitch line. Clearly any level-headed person who hears that our executive branch is collecting information about people who disagree with them is going to be suspicious. Add that to the White House’s threats to “punch back twice as hard” and people are going to start to wondering what country they live in.
Here’s the real question though: how is that a party and ideology that is so obsessed with privacy when it comes to aborting children during pregnancy can, with a straight face, say that they don’t see what is wrong with our Commander-in-Chief collecting names for a political hit list? How can the party that spent 8 years telling us that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, actually see nothing wrong with our President collecting names to punch back against twice as hard?
Bush took enormous amounts of criticism over his tenure – probably as much or more than any recent president especially given he was the first to have to deal with being attacked from the blogosphere. Not once did he encourage his supporters to start ratting out people they heard disagreeing with his policy. And let’s be clear about one thing: Obama is collecting names of people who disagree with him on policy and nothing more. These aren’t people making threats to him, Democrats, or the nation. These are people who have nothing more than policy disagreements with him and the Democrats.
If the exploding townhalls aren’t a clue to the Obama Administration that things aren’t going according to plan, I don’t think anything will wake them up. And if they don’t wake up soon, they’re going to start punching back twice as hard against the people who put them in office.