Clapper says we should dump Constitution, Obama apparently agrees

Recidivist felon and uber-capo James Clapper redefined the term ‘balls’ yesterday by using the term ‘accomplices’ in reference to Edward Snowden’s revelations of the Clapper Mafia’s activities.

Recall that Clapper is the guy who got away with lying under oath to the U.S. Congress, which used to get you jail term or at the very least a hefty boot out of government service for life. Martha Stewart did several months for a similar act of felonious falsifying, but in the Weird New World that we now live in, official government criminals don’t even get a reprimand from their chief enabler, Barack Obama.

There is exactly zero evidence that Snowden had any help at all, which is a pretty devastating indictment of the security standards at the country’s cancerous and constantly spreading spy operation that Clapper presides over. Clapper, however, has a vast phalanx of co-conspirators to help him commit his crimes and cover them up, as is usually the case among the amoral hyper-powerful.

Clapper seemed to be avoiding committing any new criminal lies yesterday and mostly confined himself to blustering that Snowden put Americans at risk by spilling the beans about the Clapper gang and their snooping. For the sake of argument, let’s assume he’s right. So what? We know restrictions on police practices indirectly endanger citizens by forcing them to solve crimes legally. If you can’t prove someone is a serial killer, you run the risk of having him kill someone while you’re trying to find out for sure. It’s called due process, and it used to matter.

But, so far anyway, we have stuck to our decision as a society to pay the price of possible new criminal acts rather than, say, authorize the police to pick up all suspects and torture them until they confess. That was the old way of doing things, and no doubt it was quite effective, perhaps even kept crime to a minimum. If you were wealthy or connected, of course, you were exempt and enjoyed life. If not, you were screwed—whether or not you had actually done something. Clapper would be delighted to return to those ways, I guess. Would you?

So far, we have decided we like our system better than that of Saudi Arabia. We keep some minimum rules and procedures to remain in place and theoretically do not give the cops free rein although this doesn’t work the same way with non-white people. But if the only criterion is, as stated by Clapper consigliere Matthew Olsen of the National Counterterrorism Center, whether Snowden’s act ‘puts us at risk of missing something that we are trying to see’, then we should promptly sign over the Constitution to our protectors and call it a fun, 200-plus-year experiment that has outlived its usefulness.

It is one of the more pathetic ironies of our times that the person presiding over the surrender of this once-revered document is a former constitutional lawyer whose supporters continue to enjoy tasty glasses of Kool-Aid.