“Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights. Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.”

—–The New York Times, a largely passive Obama cheerleader and enabler for the past four years, in an editorial regarding the revelations of NSA monitoring of personal phone calls of American citizens, The Times approvingly quoted Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, (R-WI), who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, that “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

There is not much that needs to be added to this, except…

• “NOW has lost all credibility”?!?!? Wow. Talk about being late to the party…

• Sure “the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it,” especially when the institution that is pledged to alert the public to abuses of power in a democracy, a free, vigorous, objective and independent press, abandons its role to become a partner and ally of those abusing power. This is what the New York Times, to its permanent shame, has done, and it can accept responsibility for the results along with the rest of the news media.

I  can’t resist noting ruefully that elsewhere in the editorial, the Times editors sneer at the Patriot Act as having been “enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it.” Isn’t that funny? I think it is. The fact that the Affordable Care Act the Times is so enamored of was also rushed through Congress unread never seemed to trouble it at all. And this, my friends, is the flagship of American journalism!

UPDATE: In a disgraceful display of cowardice and lack of integrity, the Times, without noting that it had done so, later changed the text of the editorial quoted so that it was not critical of the President, but of “the Administration,” and now only on “this issue.” One can only speculate about what pressure caused this change to be made, and from where it came. How sad for journalism and the nation that the New York Times has descended to such a pusillanimous and timid state.

The text I posted was the original version, and the accurate one.

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Source: Daily Caller

Graphic: Herd