Cavuto: Government Abusing Its Rights By Taking Away Ours
NEIL CAVUTO:Posted on June 10, 2013> All these invasions of our personal privacy under the guise of protecting us. Are just wrong. This is no longer about keeping us safe.
This is about keeping us safely under the government's eye. And it's clear the government is watching, all the time.
So I'm not here now, nor was I this weekend, to hear anyone trying to protect a president, any president. I wanted to focus on protecting people--all people.
Because these aren't isolated incidents, my friends.
Julian might warn about conflating scandals. I worry about the totality of these scandals.
As I told him, the incidents may differ, but the pattern is disturbingly the same. Government abusing its rights by taking away ours.
A Justice Department that spies on reporters.
An IRS that targets conservative groups. Then conservative donors.
A Health and Human Services Department that strong-arms companies into promoting a healthcare law.
The NSA ordering Verizon to surrender millions of phone records.
Then going after the likes of Google and Apple and Ebay to get a hold of their e-mails. Our emails.
Forget about cluster, does Custer ring a bell?
These issues surround us, my friends, and to minimize their threat or sluff them off as individual political incidents, each bearing no resemblance to the other, makes a mockery of us all.
That's why I got angry. That's why i interrupted Julian, who is otherwise a friend, this is foolish.
And that's why, after repeated attempts to get him to shut up about making this a political discussion, I simply decided to cut his mike.
Some of you found that rude.
But I found subjecting you to the same old back and forth talking points on what are systemic assaults on our civil liberties, would be even ruder.
So, I did something I never do. I lost it.
But for good reason.
This isn't just a scandal, my friends. Or a series of scandals. Over even scandalous behavior.
I have no idea how high up this goes. Any of this goes. Only that it goes. And goes and goes. Part of a business as usual pattern of assaulting the liberties we've apparently taken for granted.
Realize what's going on here, and whether triggered by a patriot act initiated under a republican president, or one put on spying steroids by a democratic one... The results are frightening.
Rifling through our taxes, collecting our phone records, spying our e-mails, our associations, our friends, our families, our lives.
If that isn't worth getting hot and bothered, frankly i don't know what is.
This isn't about some fair and balanced debate on a story. Because there is no fair and balanced way to debate the core of our liberties.
Either we have them and enjoy them, or we do not.
And the next time someone reduces it to a left-right thing; you bet I'll cut in.
And if they refuse to step back, you bet--I will cut their mike. VIDEO>
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