Parsing...
First off, you need to know that most people who're in politics are lawyers by trade... in DC, everyone and their mother is a lawyer... and that's where the parsing comes in.
Parsing is a linguistic game in which the person telling you something is saying it in such a way that they are not breaking the law or by taking something out of context saying it in any number of ways to make any number of points... and the best recent example of this was how when Alberto Gonzales was testifying to Congress about the NSA domestic warrant-less wiretapping, he always put the qualifier of "the program that has been discussed (or disclosed) by the President" in front of anything before he went on to talk about warrant-less wiretapping. For me, being a former professional parser myself, that told me that there are OTHER programs that we don't know about that have to deal with domestic warrant-less eavesdropping... and Alberto G. didn't even do a good job of hiding that fact.
We're never going to get to the bottom of any of that until we get a new President who doesn't believe that the executive branch is above the legislature or judicial branch of government... and that day can't come soon enough.
Parsing is a linguistic game in which the person telling you something is saying it in such a way that they are not breaking the law or by taking something out of context saying it in any number of ways to make any number of points... and the best recent example of this was how when Alberto Gonzales was testifying to Congress about the NSA domestic warrant-less wiretapping, he always put the qualifier of "the program that has been discussed (or disclosed) by the President" in front of anything before he went on to talk about warrant-less wiretapping. For me, being a former professional parser myself, that told me that there are OTHER programs that we don't know about that have to deal with domestic warrant-less eavesdropping... and Alberto G. didn't even do a good job of hiding that fact.
We're never going to get to the bottom of any of that until we get a new President who doesn't believe that the executive branch is above the legislature or judicial branch of government... and that day can't come soon enough.
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