My plan for this week was to write about how the Republican Party needs to change if it hopes to do well in the next election cycle. I was going to link you to videos of Michelle Bachman making outrageous claims about vaccines, clips of Todd Akin making insensitive comments about “legitimate rape” and articles about Mitt Romney putting his foot in his mouth when describing low-income Americans. I was ready to sit down and give you eight hundred words about how badly the Republican Party needs to adapt. How the GOP needs to focus more on human rights and less on the institutions that grant them. I was going to talk about immigration, same-sex marriage and health care.

I was going to talk about all that.

Thanks to Barack Obama, I will no longer be doing that.

To steal a phrase from my father, Obama is very rapidly becoming the emperor with no clothes. This is a man who in 2005 voted no on wire-tapping and then turned around and tapped every wire he could find. Obama appealed to voters in two different election cycles with promises of hope and change. We were supposed to blame the problems of the country on his predecessor and accept him as our “savior.” President Obama was going to lead this country back to the Promised Land, into another century of “American excellence” (forgive me if this all seems hyperbolic, I’m doing my best to channel the man himself).

I continued supporting the President through the Benghazi scandal. With all the different information coming in out about Ambassador Stevens turning down security and the GOP doctoring emails, it is something I was ready to move on from. It is not disrespectful to the four men who died to accept that this was something that could have been handled better, but at the end of the day wasn’t a malicious cover up. In reality the big problem here for me is that our President felt the need to have all the answers, all the information, instead of realizing there is no weakness in simply admitting “we don’t know right now.” We’ll come back to this need to have all the information in a second.

I didn’t even condemn our President after this current IRS scandal. After all, maybe he didn’t know it was happening? It would be unreasonable to expect one man to know everything that happens within our government. However, I gave some thought to the idea that our president has created a culture where individuals feel they have the right to break the rules without worry. As far as I was concerned, the biggest problem with the IRS targeting Republican groups was that the President preaches big government and now we have a situation where we cannot trust that big government. Don’t worry; we’ll be coming back to this too.

So here we are. In the midst of ongoing scandal number three (we’re lumping the ridiculous monitoring of a FOX News reporter by the Justice Department in here), the question must be asked, where do we draw the line? It recently came to light that the National Security Agency has been tracking cell phone data of all Verizon customers (I can only assume they chose Verizon because it’s the only network you can actually complete a call on). This is where I have chosen to draw the line. President Obama has spoken so often about the things George Bush did wrong (a president I had my fair share of issues with) that he seems to have missed the fact that he is doing the same things. The similarities pile up when one looks at a checklist of Bush’s misdeeds:

Wire-tapping? Check.

Keeping Guantanamo open? Check.

Still at war? Check.

Still don’t have universal health-care? Check.

President Obama came out this week and attempted to defend the monitoring of cell phone metadata. He told us that they haven’t been using the information, that no names have been checked and that no one is listening to your calls. It is at this moment that I would like to raise my hand and ask our President a question.

“Ahem, Mr. President, if no one is listening to our calls or using the information gathered, what is the point of gathering it? It’s actually ridiculous to think anyone could believe you are gathering this information and then doing nothing with it. Thanks Mr. President, I just needed a little clarification.”

This is not the cell phone video you took at that concert three years ago that you knew you were never going to look at again. It was information the NSA was going to use at some point. This is not one of those passive actions that just accidentally happens. This is a real violation of our privacy.

The above paragraph doesn’t even take into account the apparent idiocy of  NSA for not possessing the basic knowledge any unfaithful husband has that anyone doing something shady (aka: “a terrorist!”) is going to use a disposable phone.

We were promised hope and change, and we’ve been given more of the same. We’ve been given secret monitoring of our personal lives; we’ve been given talk of more government controlled cameras to prevent things like the Boston Marathon bombings (apparently those guys didn’t have Verizon). I had a problem with the Patriot Act when George Bush used it, and I have a problem with it now. We were promised hope and change, and we’ve been given disappointment and a President we can no longer trust, who no longer deserves our trust.

To think, this was going to be an article about how the Republican Party needs to change.

Hey Mr. President, can you hear me now?

Good.

 

Reach Contributor Calum Hayes here; follow him here.