Bush Grindhouse Launches "We Want Angel Back" Approach Over Telcom Amnesty

In the Sam Peckinpah masterpiece, "The Wild Bunch", the classic finale is set up with Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Lyle Gorch (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) confronting the Mexican General, and his soldiers, with the demand "We want Angel back", their fallen, and tortured, comrade, and, within minutes, a ferocious, blazing, epic gun battle erupts.

Today, the Bush Grindhouse is giving their version of "We Want Angel Back", with a fusillade of Op-Eds, demanding that Congress give The Commander Guy the right to illegal wiretap American citizens, and to give the telecommunication companies immunity and amnesty from any lawsuits arising out of the illegal wiretapping.

In The Washington Post, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pens "Partners In the War On Terror: Telecommunications Firms And the Senate's FISA Bill", which Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, characterizes it as "Jay Rockefeller channels Dick Cheney's fear-mongering to urge telecom amnesty".

Over in Ruppert Murdoch;s Wall Street Journal, a trio of heavyweights - Mr. Civiletti/U.S. attorney general under President Jimmy Carter, Mr. Thornburgh/U.S. attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and Judge Webster/former director of the CIA and former director of the FBI - don't pull any punches, kick starting it right in the headline with "AT WAR - Surveillance Sanity: Companies that help protect the U.S. against attack deserve immunity from frivolous lawsuits."

Hmmm ... Let's get this right ... Trampling the Constitution and violating our civil rights = "frivolous lawsuits".

Basic sum-up of them - If we don't let The Commander Guy do whatever he wants, and if we don't let the telecom companies off the hook with lawsuits, terrorists are going to come to your house and kill you.

And, in case you missed it, the ground cover for todays attack got laid down yesterday, with Neocon Pimp Norman Podhoretz throwing a dementia fit about how we have to attack and bomb Iran, and if you don't go along with that, Anyone Who Doesn’t Want To ‘Bomb Iran’ Is Appeasing ‘Hitler’.

Glenn Greenwald chimes in on this one as well, with "Hitlers, Hitlers and more Hitlers" and Steve Benin, over at The Carpetbagger Report works the thematic geography angle with "Connecting 2007 Iran to 1933 Germany".

Here's Some Sanity

Hitting on both Telcom/Wiretapping battle, and the drumbeat for war with Iran, were two exceptional Op-Eds this past weekend.

In this past Sunday's The New York Times, the Op-Ed page carried both Studs Terkel, and their own Paul Krugman, these gentleman, essential hitting on similar themes - Fear ... Ignorance ... An abusive, over-reaching, fear-mongering government.

Check them out;

Stud Terkel - The Wiretap This Time

Paul Krugman - Fearing Fear Itself

Oh yeah, if you have never seen "The Wild Bunch", you don't want to know how it ends.