B.P. Terpstra
Long story short, hacking is noble if you’re a powerful left-winger, but sinful if you’re allegedly rightwing. It’s also acceptable for powerful left-wingers to tap the phones of less powerful left-wingers, in order to cement their leadership ambitions.
The first and most important principle to keep in mind though is to have an unbalanced worldview, bordering on schizophrenic.
Don’t worry. There’s a proud history here you should be aware of. Take Democrat Obama’s hero Democrat FDR. The historian Paul Johnson reminds us in Modern Times (page 650):
The tradition of presidential skulduggery had begun with Franklin Roosevelt. He had created his own ‘intelligence unit’, responsible only to himself, with a staff of eleven and financed by State Department ‘Special Emergency’ money. He used Hoover’s FBI and the Justice Department to harass his enemies, especially in the press, and to tap their phones – the mineworkers’ leader John L. Lewis being one victim. He made a desperate effort to ‘get’ the Chicago Tribune, which he hated, in the courts. He even used the intelligence service to bug his wife’s hotel room.
Right-wingers are always targets. Take Democrat Obama’s other hero, Democrat JFK. History again:
[John] Kennedy and his brother Robert positively revelled in the game, and Kennedy’s chief regret was that he had not made Robert head of the CIA, to bring it under close family control. At the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy in 1962 had FBI agents carry out dawn raids on the homes of executives of US Steel who had defied his brother’s policies. In their civil rights campaign, the Kennedy brothers exploited the Federal contracts system and used executive orders in housing finance (rather than legislation) to get their way. They plotted against right-wing radio and TV stations. Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone-tapping increased markedly. So did executive ‘bugging’: the large-scale womanizing of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, was tapped and then played to newspaper editors.
As professional journalists, though it’s your moral duty to twist or bury history, while sharply focusing your eyes on Rupert Murdoch’s deceased News of the World paper because what you’re witnessing is “unprecedented.”
Modern Times notes, “Until the Nixon presidency the media was extremely selective in its publicizing of any presidential misdemeanors.” Your job, therefore, is to continue to encourage cultural schizophrenia, as government-first journalists, as leftwing ethicists, as the seasonal enemies of hacking, period.