Why would Trump mention tapes, in this day and age, when we can record our surroundings on our phones? Chances are, the only recordings of his conversation with Jim Comey, when he asked Comey to stop investigation Mike Flynn, were cell phone recordings. Trump should stop thinking he can act like a mob boss and start understanding that he must play nicely with others.
Remember Watergate? Specifically, all the great music with which creative artists responded to the corruption? We need our artists to commemorate the goings-on of today with some music! Lets take entertainment back from the corporations that have come to control it and make music great again!
In addition to his lack of empathy toward parents whose son died in 2004, while fighting in Iraq, Donald Trump has gone for the international jugular vein and invited hackers in Russia to commit espionage by hacking email accounts owned by government officials, most notably Hillary Clinton. Standing before a live microphone, he actually asked them to hack and reveal sensitive information. It's almost as if he thought that sort of thing was legal, and without any risks!
Hacking and wiretapping with the intention of influencing an election is hardly original. Trump apparently has forgotten 1972, when Nixon unlawfully recorded conversations of his political opponents. Of course, an obvious difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon was intelligent enough to understand that such actions are against the law, and attempted to hide his involvement when the news broke. Trump, it seems, either does not remember Watergate, or failed to learn from it.
While Clinton could have handled her email correspondence more safely while she served as Secretary of State, invoking the criminal element of another country, particularly one that is not one of our allies, is dangerous. It is also something that is no laughing matter, so if Trump is jesting, he should learn self control. Why would a presidential candidate laughingly request that others make a crime victim out of his opponent?
Whistle blowing. A fun, new concept that really shouldn't represent a necessity. But yet, it does. What a shame that we do not teach history well enough in our public schools to avoid that other necessity of repeating history when we fail to learn an important lesson the first time. Or the second, third, or fourth time, as the case may be.
The subject of the expectation of privacy, and respect for the same, has been in the spotlight many times in American history. We have local and federal laws protecting privacy, and our nation's Constitution addresses it, as well. Verdicts in capital murder cases have been overturned because of governmental abuses of citizens' rights to privacy. A republican president even resigned as a result of the way his administration treated the rights of others to privacy. Anyone remember Watergate? So why was it necessary for Edward Snowden to remind the general public that we still have not learned a damn thing from our own history?
Back in the day, before the internet, we got things done the old fashioned way. A very recently published book titled The Burglary describes the actions of John and Bonnie Raines, and Keith Forsythe whistleblowing without the internet. J. Edgar Hoover, the head honcho of the FBI in 1971, was already notorious for blackmailing and threatening others. Despite American law and the Constitution, he established and sanctioned government practices of blatantly ignoring the rights of American citizens. Digging up dirt and using personal information to which he had no legal right was his most typical tool of blackmail, and it was his policy to encourage all law enforcement agencies to violate the law this way. Granted, he was FBI, not state or local police departments, but we cannot forget what rolls downhill.
Bonnie Raines cased the FBI building in Media, Pennsylvania, and one night, she and her cohorts broke in and stole a bunch of classified documents which outlined directives to snoop illegally, blackmail, threaten, and bypass the rights of anyone and everyone who found themselves at cross purposes with the government, as it concerned J. Edgar Hoover. After finding pertinent bits and pieces of information in their loot, the group anonymously gave it to a journalist for the Washington Post. The attorney general serving at the time asked the Post not to publish this information, and J. Edgar Hoover was furious.......yet, the show went on. Much of the privacy and many of the rights connected to privacy enjoyed by Americans today, along with the ability to question authority from the individual standpoint owes to this anonymous action and risk, taken by these three individuals. J. Edgar Hoover sought to become more powerful than the Truth, but alas! He was unsuccessful. The burglars were never caught, and their identities never came to light until their book was published. What did come to light was the corruption that had engulfed and swallowed all branches of the government at the time.
What isn't known is whether or not J. Edgar Hoover ever stopped to consider the irony of this particular burglary taking place in a town called "Media".
Interesting. Nixon actually went on national television stating that blackmail might not actually be blackmail, in elected political office, if the blackmailer suspected that he might not get paid! Voters, please pay attention when you vote, and don't get your candidates at Kmart!
Remember the old days, when it was always considered prudent not to write a message on paper unless it was something one wished to proclaim from the rooftops? And we were occasionally reminded that a piece of paper can last longer than the writer who wrote on it? Can anyone remember the days before national television, when print media ruled? It seems that America has a few people in power who do not remember these things. It also seems as if some of these people either never learned about Richard Nixon, and the Watergate scandal or have forgotten about it. While Watergate wiretapping was unsophisticated compared to today's sources of information and methods of harvesting the same, it is surprising that NSA did not expect anyone to find out about their disregard for the Fourth Amendment rights of all Americans.
It may be time for our President to address the nation about this, and to learn from Nixon's mistakes. The warrantless snooping and unfounded investigations of innocent citizens since 2001 have not significantly reduced the number of occurances of any type of crime, and have not assisted in finding missing persons. In view of the glaring inefficiency of civil rights violations as a form of governance, perhaps it is time to try some transparency and honesty.
Why would Trump mention tapes, in this day and age, when we can record our surroundings on our phones? Chances are, the only recordings of his conversation with Jim Comey, when he asked Comey to stop investigation Mike Flynn, were cell phone recordings. Trump should stop thinking he can act like a mob boss and start understanding that he must play nicely with others.
