Tuesday, July 02, 2013

palpatine in a wig wants all your guns and all your information...,



NYTimes | She fought so hard to outlaw assault weapons that the National Rifle Association deemed her efforts tantamount to proposing the largest gun ban in American history. Well before the Supreme Court took up same-sex marriage, she sponsored a bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. And she urged President George W. Bush, and later President Obama, to shut down the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein — California Democrat and liberal lioness — has taken on a role that is leaving many of her allies on the left dismayed: as perhaps the most forthright and unapologetic Congressional defender of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

“I think it’s an act of treason,” she said of the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the N.S.A. contractor who revealed classified details about the programs, even as many liberals were hailing him as a whistle-blower. She has praised James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who has been accused of lying to the Senate about the scope of the programs, as an honest and direct man.

At 80 — the Senate’s oldest member — she says she is resolute that the danger from terrorists demands an aggressive national security apparatus.

“I feel I have an obligation to do everything I can to keep this country safe,” Ms. Feinstein, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is one of the few Americans with detailed knowledge of the N.S.A.’s efforts, said in a recent interview from her private Capitol Hill office. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Although her political upbringing in the liberal bastion of San Francisco City Hall, where she served first as a city supervisor and then as mayor, suggests otherwise, her beliefs have always defied an easy caricature. She supports capital punishment, saying the Boston Marathon bombings should be prosecuted as a death penalty case. She cast votes to sustain the Iraq war until its later stages and voted to confirm Bush cabinet and judicial nominees from her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Her Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee often had no idea when she would vote against them. Her support for Mr. Bush’s nominee for attorney general in 2007, Michael B. Mukasey, prompted some in the California Democratic Party to try to censure her.

To her critics today, she is just another victim of Stockholm syndrome on the Congressional Intelligence Committees: an enabler of government overreach who has been intoxicated by the privilege of knowing the deepest-held state secrets.

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