So, when McConnell says "Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical" he's flat out lying, for which there is a mountain of evidence.

The NSA program, taken as a whole, is the very reverse of surgical.

2. Further, McConnell's "kill Americans" is the first use of der dolchstosslegende ("stab in the back" theory) by a major political figure (in America today, not in Germany in the 30s). We knew that was coming; now it's here.

But, set that aside for a minute and go to another angle with me.

The question I'd always like to ask (and require an answer - not a dodge - to) these jackas*es when they say "X# Americans will die because of whatever" is this:

"How many of the X# Americans who you say will die from the whatever you claim to be fighting, would have died from other causes?"

The answer, by the way, is "X", i.e., all of them.

The defining, universal part of the human experience is two-fold:  we are born, and then we die.  No one has escaped this fate and, so long as there are people, no one will.  Period.

All those people whom we mourned after they died on 9/11, were going to die anyway.  No immortals lost their lives in the making of that movie.

We can argue over how we are to live our lives, but waving the possibility of death over us to herd us somewhere or into living our lives in a particular manner is both intellectually dishonest, and morally fraudulent.  You, government official (or anyone else, for that matter), cannot threaten a person who has come to the understanding that that with which you threaten him - death and the fear of death - is going to come anyway.  That understanding frees the person achieving it to live to the fullest, until that time comes.  It could come tomorrow, or thirty or fifty years from now.  And, threatener, that understanding is what you fear, because it shows you to be the hollow, powerless fraud you are.  

It must be horribly frustrating for those charged - by their voluntarily remaining in the jobs they hold, wielding the "authority" they wield - with the duty of herding people into whatever species of conformity or obedience they demand, when those being herded recognize the emptiness of the death-threat which is their ultimate fallback.

Which, by the way, explains the thugs' resort to torture - it's as much out of frustration that their threats of death have no more effect on those (particularly the religiously-well-learned) who understand that the threat is merely telling someone "I'm going to give you what you are going to get anyway."  Kind of like a three-year-old pounding something which won't go together.