Jack Cafferty's Words of "Wisdom": Specter Preventing Bush "Dictatorship"

During today's 4pm EDT hour of CNN's The Situation Room, Jack Cafferty expressed his "outrage" over the revelation that the National Security Agency has been compiling a national database of phone records from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. Referring to Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter’s demand that the phone companies testify before Congress regarding this issue, Cafferty angrily stated that Specter could be the one preventing the United States from becoming a "full-blown dictatorship."

Wolf Blitzer: "Let’s get some words of wisdom from Jack Cafferty. He’s in New York right now. Jack?"

Jack Cafferty: "I don’t know about wisdom, but you’ll get a little outrage. We better all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that’s standing between us and a full-blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours and tens of millions of other Americans. Shortly after 9/11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super-secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens. All part of the war on terror, President Bush says. Why don’t you go find Osama bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?"

Video clip (45 seconds): Real (1.4 MB) or Windows Media (1.6 MB), plus MP3 audio (275 KB)

Cafferty: "The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and declared the government’s doing nothing wrong, and all this is just fine. Is it? Is it legal? Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrant-less spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation. Read that sentence again. A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says, okay, and drops the whole thing. We’re in some serious trouble here, boys and girls. Here’s the question: Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or your permission? If it doesn’t, it sure as hell ought to. E-mail us your thoughts at CaffertyFile@CNN.com or go to CNN.com/CaffertyFile. Wolf?"

Blitzer: "Words of wisdom, as I said, Jack, outraged, as you clearly are. Thanks very much."