Republican Representative Pete King's disdain for anyone who would impose hard line constitutional compliance on the military or intelligence communities has been a decades-long mainstay. It's well-documented and not really worth digging into again. When Senator Rand Paul started pressing the issue, King was one of the loudest - and angriest - voices of opposition. Since Paul hasn't dropped his strict constructionist stance, King has been forced to ramp up the rhetoric. It's become painfully obvious that King absolutely despises Paul's political stance, and that's fine, but this weekend he took it a step too far.
During a Sunday morning Fox News appearance, Paul targeted the NSA's constitutionally dubious cell phone spying. King followed him, and turned his faux outrage up to eleven:
“Rand Paul does not know what he’s talking about. And Rand Paul is really spreading fear among the American people. And he also, today, I understand on the show he was comparing General Clapper to Snowden. I mean, to me, either he’s totally uninformed, or he’s part of that hate America crowd that I thought left us in the 1960s. In any event, he doesn’t deserve to in the United States Senate for spreading that type of misperception and absolute lies to be honest with you.”
"If Rand Paul had been around and we had listened to him, hundreds of New Yorkers would be dead today. That would be on his conscience. Or maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him, I don’t know."
It's one thing to suggest that Rand Paul's stance is too stringent. We can have that debate. RINO's like King will be forced to argue that the Patriot Act somehow trumps the 4th Amendment, and eventually they'll probably lose, but if they want that fight, we can have it.
However, it's quite another matter to suggest that Rand Paul hates America, is lying to the people who elected him, doesn't deserve his position, and would be unfazed by the deaths of hundreds of U.S. citizens. Obviously, there's nothing in Paul's history that suggests King's charges have any basis in reality.
Beyond that, King's assertions about the effectiveness of the NSA's data collection scheme are difficult to prove, since the agency is so secretive. We really have no way of knowing if the plan in question has failed, or if it's worked wonders. We also have no way of knowing if the NSA has limited itself in the ways King claims it has, since it operates behind a largely impenetrable veil. About the only thing we do know is that when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before Congress, he was caught blatantly lying.
Given the track record of deceit, why would anyone be so quick to trupmet the "law abiding transparency" of the NSA?
To be blunt, King sounds like a man who's had his very cushy New York cage rattled, and he's flailing at the man that he thinks is shaking the bars. King's problem is that, while Paul may be the most prominent face of those who are willing to fight this battle, he's far from alone. There are millions of Americans, on both sides of the political spectrum, who believe that King is positioning himself as the champion of an overtly unconstitutional surveillance state.
Lately, every time the New York Representative opens his mouth, he reinforces the idea that he believes in "perceived safety at any cost" - even if the cost is essential liberty.
