Barack Obama's "yea" vote on the FISA legislation demonstrates good sense. In fact, I'd say wer were witness to a Presidential candidate acting Presidential.Government is a balancing act, in this case balancing the necessity to protect Americans from another terrorist attack with the need to protect the privacy of Americans. Retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies complying with orders from their government would only have hurt the telecom industry by creating a mass of individual and class-action lawsuits, probably winning billions of dollars from the telecom companies, the majority of which would not go to the recipients of the judgment but to the lawyers bringing the suits. And that cost would immediately be passed on to you in the form of higher rates and fees, and remain there as a future source of profit for the telcos. The compromise was to set up oversight to the FISA court so that all "eavesdropping" has some form of merit, and brings back the necessity to provide some form of accountability which was completely lacking in the draconian Bush system. Think of the public backlash that Senator Obama would have faced if another terrorist attack on American soil were to occur, and he had not supported legislation that would have enabled authorities to prevent the occurrence.
It also seems to me that President Obama would be in a much better position to mandate specific legislation or modify the current system better than Senator Obama ever could. I have a feeling that he will do so, but he has to be elected first; if he doesn't, whatever is second just doesn't matter.This is the essential difference between being proactive and reactive, which boils down to which is the more noble approach: preventing a national tragedy, or chasing down and punishing those who commit a national tragedy after the fact. Both sides of that argument have compelling, valid points. On one side, we have those who believe our government has a fundamental responsibility to do everything in its power to insure the protection and safety of its citizens. On the other, we have those who believe that safety is the price of freedom, and those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither. Hillary Clinton's vote surprised me a bit, given her history of hawkish stances on national security issues. But I don't think Barack Obama will lose any votes by acting in the best interests of American security. The FISA legislation was a lose-lose situation for Obama. Had he voted against it, he would have been labeled as soft on national security and taken a great deal of criticism from the right. The McCain Campaign and his sycophants don't miss any opportunity to whine and complain, and we'd in that vein we'd hear no end of how Senator Obama is soft on terrorists, supports terrorists, loves terrorists; I can see the commercials in my head even as I type. Not to mention the outrageous comments we'd get in our inboxes, confirming Obama's "secret Islamic terrorist connections"... Well, I'm sure you all have good imaginations around how this would play out in the blogs.
Voting for FISA makes him seem against civil liberties and he takes a great deal of criticism from the left, and yet the worst thing to happen is he gets painted as a "flip flopper", which is a great deal better than "terrorism supporter". Senator Obama definitely had the Sword of Damocles poised over his head on this issue, but a little bad press is better than a lot of bad press. If he erred, he did so on the side of caution, and that makes him look Presidential in my book.John McCain didn't even vote on the issue, and regardless of which side of the political spectrum you occupy, this, and the Medicare bill, were vitally important votes. I find it very telling that the last time Senator McCain visited the Senate was April 8. In fact, of the 169 Senate votes so far this year, John McCain has only voted 36 times.
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