Is the Word “Senator” Probably Synonymous with Lazy, Irresponsible, and Blowhard? — More than Half the Senate Ducked a Closed Door Meeting with the Intelligence Community about the PRISM Telephone Metadata Snooping Program

© 2013 Peter Free

 

16 June 2013

 

 

An institution that deserves the public’s undiluted contempt

 

From The Hill:

 

 

A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs. (WATCH VIDEO).

 

Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials.

 

Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity.

 

© 2013 Alexander Bolton, Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home, The Hill (15 June 2013)

 

Given that the government’s large scale snooping implicates the Fourth Amendment, Connor Simpson, writing for the Atlantic Wire surmised that:

 

 

As the PRISM scandal racks up more and more headlines, and the President's critics get louder and louder, this meeting will likely become the focus of intense scrutiny.

 

© 2013 Connor Simpson, The Majority of Senate Skipped a Classified PRISM Briefing, Atlantic Wire (15 June 2013)

 

 

Contrast the Senate’s institutional behavior with that of the nation’s multi-jurisdictional firefighters and military units, who helped to extinguish Colorado’s devastating Black Forest Fire

 

On the one hand, you have people risking their lives and health around the clock to protect other people’s homes.

 

On the other, you have the U.S. Senate which cannot even do its laughably safe and almost entirely standards-lacking job.

 

 

The moral? — Some people and institutions are parasites

 

So, why are we rewarding these people by paying them high salaries — apparently for collectively drowning the nation in their irritating puffery and incompetence — and then providing them with bucket loads of post-Congressional lobbying wealth after their years of blood-sucking debauchery?

 

Is this the “democracy” that the United States wants to unleash on the world?  No wonder nobody’s taking us up on our example of how to screw up a governmental system.