CLAPPER’S CLAPTRAP: NSA MAN “DOETH PROTEST TOO MUCH, METHINKS”

Amid the global furor over the NSA spying on our European allies, and this weekend’s massive demonstrations in Washington, DC, against this agency’s unconstitutional invasion of privacy at home, two top NSA official “strongly denied” that they had eavesdropped on our allies.

Which reminded this writer of the famous quote from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (from Wikipedia):

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The quote comes from Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, act III, scene II, where it is spoken by Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. In Shakespeare’s time, “protest” meant “vow” or “declare solemnly”. The context is a play within a play, and the Queen criticizes the Player Queen’s speech on the grounds that excessive avowal of her plan to not remarry after the Player King’s death sounds hollow and insincere. Today, “protest” means “declare an objection”, so the phrase has come to mean that one can “insist so passionately about something not being true that people suspect the opposite of what one is saying.”

This is worth repeating: “Insist so passionately about something not being true that people suspect the opposite of what one is saying.”

That’s what today’s Clapper claptrap sounded like. An insult to our intelligence.  Anyone who buys into such “lie and deny” lines probably also believed Bill Clinton in 1998 when he claimed, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Meanwhile, if President Obama indeed did not know about the  NSA spying on European officials, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, as his administration now claims, how come no one at NSA has been fired since Obama found out about it from the European media stories, if not his own people? Why has the president not spoken out himself against it?

“Silence is acquiescence,” they say. By remaining silent instead of condemning the NSA spying, Obama is showing us that may be a part of the problem.

No surprise there. “Birds of a feather flock together” (see New York Times proves another President has been caught lying to American public: Impeach Obama?; From Obama vs. Obama flip-flops to outright deception).

 Top two US intelligence officials

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