Peter King Hates Your Civil Liberties; Flips Out About His Own Party Rejecting Unconstitutional Spying On Americans (original) (raw)

from the is-this-guy-for-real? dept

If you asked Hollywood to come up with an extreme caricature of a crazed hawkish anti-civil liberties politician with a tenuous grasp on the facts, I don’t think even they would come up with someone quite as crazy as Rep. Peter King. Rep. King sees terrorist threats absolutely everywhere — so long as he believes they’re coming from brown people. When it comes to IRA terrorists, he’s a big supporter. But the brown kind? Well, to him, they require Americans to give up all civil liberties — and dare any politicians point to the 4th Amendment? Well, apparently they’re unfit for office.

So you have to imagine the sort of brain explosion he must have gone through on Friday, when his own damn party declared the NSA’s activities unconstitutional, and demanded that they be stopped — once again highlighting that King and his colleague Rep. Mike Rogers are on the fringe of the Republican Party: extremists who don’t give a shit about the rights of Americans.

And, indeed, upon finding out that his own party actually respects the rights of Americans, King threw a verbal shit-fit, claiming that such respect for the American public is the equivalent of “signing our own death warrant as a party.”

“We’re going to make the Democrats and Barack Obama the party of national security,” he said. “It’s signing our own death warrant as a party.”

That seems… unlikely on multiple levels of course. Study after study after study has shown that a very large percentage of the public is quite concerned about NSA overreach. They’re less and less concerned about terrorist attacks, since about all that seems to keep happening is the FBI foiling its own plots. Similarly, while a growing number of liberals are supportive of the government wiping out civil liberties, that seems to be solely because “their guy” is in charge.

I’m honestly baffled as to King’s play here. It’s long been rumored that he’s going to run for President in 2016. Does he honestly think that “fear the brown people” campaign is going to attract very many votes? What happened last week shows, again, that King is a fringe nutball, even within his own party.

Filed Under: civil liberties, nsa, peter king, republicans, rnc, surveillance