All along the watchtower

With all the passion a beady-eyed Stoic can muster, indie Senator Joe Lieberman appeared on ABC’s This Week and told viewers what the U.S. government needs to do to protect itself from “terror attacks.” No policy change or stealing other people’s oil—what Lieberman suggests is that the Senate and House get together and agree that America needs to be under greater government surveillance.

“We’re at a partisan gridlock over… whether the American government can listen in to conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens,” Lieberman said (in fact, the argument is about Bush’s authorization of spying on American citizens). Praising the Brits for having cameras “all over London,” Lieberman said it was “common sense to do that [in the U.S.] much more widely.” Lieberman chalked the “petty partisan fighting” up to either ideology or “plain mistrust of the administration,” and claimed added surveillance can be accomplished “without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Lieberman also said there shouldn’t be any discussion on leaving Iraq now that the U.S. has got “the enemy on the run.” The day the interview aired, the enemy was running from six freshly killed U.S. servicemen.

by Scott Saxon