Time To Recalibrate The Irony Dampeners

FOX News:

The White House strategy of turning supporters into snitches when they see "fishy" information about the health care debate may run afoul of the law, legal experts say.

"The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it," Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday.

"There's also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can't try to rewrite history by pretending it didn't receive anything," he said.

"If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute."

Four words:

BUSH'S. WARRANTLESS. WIRETAPPING. PROGRAM.

Ahem. Do Obama's critics at FOX really want to bring up the issue of "We think the White House is overstepping its legal boundaries" after cheerleading the plethora of Bush era constitutional violations? Have Republicans forgotten about the years 2001-2008? We're talking about the White House wanting to know about people who are disrupting town hall meetings, and we're really going to play the fascism card on Obama after the last administration shredded the Constitution, the entire notion of checks and balances and nearly instituted a real dictatorship?

I will be the first person to say that Obama must roll back these Bush era violations of law. But for anyone on the Right to go after Obama on this after years of applauding Bush's oversight-free illegalities is the absolute worst of hypocrisy.

Where were these same "critics" after 9/11? Telling anyone who dared oppose Bush that we were traitors to our coutry for wanting oversight. Now, these slimy bastards are the first to scream bloody murder when a Democrat is in power in the White House. These were the first people to say that revealing the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program was in fact treason.

Assholes.

[UPDATE 6:51 PM] Wonk Room's Ian Millhiser completely busts this one from a legal standpoint.

By Thursday afternoon, Fox News even invented a made-up case saying that the President’s actions are unconstitutional:

It’s absolutely unconstitutional, I mean, the Supreme Court has ruled directly on point. When Richard Nixon was worried about anti-war protestors during the Vietnam era, he sent FBI agents undercover—CIA agents undercover—which was against the law for them to be operating in the US. And military in civilian garb to take photographs and to use tape recorders to record the voice, and they sued; it’s a very famous case. And the Supreme Court said . . . . the government is prohibited from intimidating people from exercising free speech, and recording their names or their voices, or asking people to spy on them would be exactly the intimidation the Supreme Court condemned.

Watch it:

We are unable to find a single Supreme Court case fitting this description, and several legal scholars whom the Wonk Room contacted were unable to identify such a case. Although there is one Nixon-era precedent dealing with soldiers spying on left-leaning organizations, that case did not say what Fox says that it said.

In Laird v. Tatum, the plaintiff challenged the Army’s practice of sending undercover intelligence agents to attend meetings that were open to the public, and gather information such as the names of the speakers and the number of attendees. The justices, however, never even reached the merits of the case because the plaintiff never showed that “he has sustained or is immediately in danger of sustaining a direct injury as the result of” the Army’s program.

Surprise! FOX "expert" lies about something, Wingnuts pick it up as fact and attack. Gets debunked, move on to the next lie.

Par for the course.