What About Guarding America’s Secrets?
by Big Dog on May 31, 2007 at 19:04 Uncategorized
I do not agree with much of what Susan Estrich says and we are politically opposite but I have read a bit about her and she had some tough times growing up so I applaud her for making something of herself despite the troubles along the way (not to minimize rape by calling it a troubles, because it is a terrible crime). I know there are many people who have tough times growing up but it is nice to hear about the ones that made something of themselves and Estrich is quite accomplished.
Estrich wrote a piece at Fox News (Fair and Balanced) and it discusses how Hillary Rodham had a bad week last week. In it she wrote this:
Let’s start with the Henry memo. I don’t know the guy personally, and he may be very good at many things. But writing a memo at this point arguing that Hillary should bypass Iowa is just plain stupid. First of all, even if that’s what you think, you don’t write it down and circulate it around the campaign. How many campaign memos will have to be leaked (so far, we’ve had Giuliani and Romney, and now Clinton) before staffers and consultants get the point that you can’t put on paper anything you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times or in the table of contents of the Drudge Report. Fox News
The article goes on to talk about Top Secret memos being an invitation for someone to leak them. As we can see in the quote above, Estrich thinks that it is wise not to write important stuff down because she believes that secrets should be secrets. From her piece, I gather that she thinks it is a bad thing for secrets to appear in the NYT (or anywhere else for that matter). I can not disagree with her. It is important for campaigns, companies, and even our country, to keep secrets.
I believe that is the point that was made some time ago when every other week someone was leaking national secrets and the NYT was reporting secret programs, war plans, agency activities and all kinds of other secret stuff. The left and their minions in the media felt it was the people’s right to know these things.
So why is it not our right to know what Hillary’s campaign plans are? Surely they can not be more important than our national secrets or worthy of more aggressive safeguarding…
The left only believes that secrets should be kept when they involve a Democratic campaign or the wife of a third shelf, loser diplomat.
Tags: Commentary
One more try…
I completely disagree with you about the need for secrecy in government. I know, it’s shocking. How would you provide oversight and make sure the government wasn’t wasting your money if they just tell you everything is a secret? We do pay for government services with our taxes and government employees (including Dick Cheney & Bush) work for us, not the other way around, remember?
The reasons most government stuff is kept secret is less national security and more because 1) they don’t want the public to see how shoddy their work actually is (Bush resistence to handing over documents to 9/11 commission, for example), or 2) they’re doing something illegal (domestic spying, secret prisons, etc.).
Why are you such an enthusiastic supporter of shoddy, incompetent work and criminal behavior?
republicans talk like rugged law-and-order individualists, but they’re happy to take criminality and unaccountability lying down. I guess it’s consistent with their upside down, failure = success, less freedom = more freedom view of the world.
Of course you would disagree. You would not know the need for secrecy but I can say it is more important to have secrets in government than it is for a presidential campaign. Now, if you mean keeping secrets like having sex with an intern at work, or hiding billing records until after the statute of limitations then I am with you. As for 9/11 records, we do not know what they contained and how they were classified so there might actually be a good reason for not sharing some of them. Since I am sure a person like you could never gain the clearance necessary to view them, you will never know.
There is no reason the public needs to know our battle plans and other programs aimed at spying or defeating our enemies. The enemy reads the newspaper too and we should not be giving him the game plan.
I realize not everyone is bright enough to understand that so we will have to leave it at that because anyone not bright enough to understand the need for secrecy probably can not breath and walk at the same time.
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