By John M. Rogitz

Where are all my W. haters at?!  Calling liberals out on their double standards now that their guy is in office has become quite the hobby of mine.  One of the most exaggerated claims about Bush is that he significantly eroded our civil liberties through things like the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping.

Fair enough, Bush did some shady things.  But even if he wire-tapped international calls without a warrant, he did not go snooping through our email accounts for local law enforcement purposes.  That is precisely what the Obama Administration wants to do.  Talk about kicking it up a notch.

I wish I could say I’m surprised that no major news outlet except Drudge reported this story.  I wish I could say I am surprised at the underwhelming response from the same people who protested President Bush so vehemently.  I wish.  This is proof that there really are two standards – one for liberals and one for conservatives.

In case you actually care (instead of just pretend-care like Bush-haters) here’s the deal with warrantless email hacking: Relying on a 1986 pre-internet law dealing with electronic data storage, the Obama Administration has been arguing that emails opened and kept in your account for over 180 days are not subject to Fourth Amendment warrant requirements.  Even the liberal 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has the highest Supreme Court turn-over rate of any of the circuits, agrees that the Constitution is more important than some law Congress enacted before Al Gore created the internet.

Still, somehow a piss-ant magistrate judge in Colorado found solid ground to grant Obama’s request to snoop through our emails.  In his decision, the judge held that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in emails that are over 180 days old.  Can you freaking believe that?  No reasonable expectation!  Only lawyers could convince themselves of such a ridiculous argument.

Thus, because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 apparently overrules the U.S. Constitution, we no longer enjoy the same privacy in our emails that we do with snail mail.  Until the Supreme Court steps in, it’s quite possible that your emails are fair game depending on the jurisdiction in which you live.

At least Bush was only intercepting international phone calls and not citizen-to-citizen communication within the United States.  The Supreme Court has long held that the Constitution does not extend to anyone or anything crossing international borders, but that’s irrelevant because liberals manifestly do not care about facts when they decide to protest civil liberties.

So beware: If your private information is stored anywhere other than your bedroom hardrive, it’s no longer private.  That’s what this judge’s ruling boils down to.  It’s shocking, but what Obama wants, Obama gets.

This is the same administration that just nationalized healthcare and plans to put our medical records into a national electronic database.  A few weeks after assuring us that our medical records would be kept confidential, Obama now wants to snoop through private emails without probable cause.  Can you imagine the reaction if Bush had pulled something like this?

The scary thing is that this has even broader implications than one instance of a disregard for the Fourth Amendment.  The same administration that wants to peek into our emails now gets another selection for the U.S. Supreme Court and will also hand-pick countless other lower courts appointees, including constitutionally-illiterate Goodwin Liu.

We continue to see what he meant by “Change,” my friends.  Just when reciting 2008 campaign slogans becomes more than a little cliché, O’ swoops in and breathes new life into our little game.  This time he’s doing it through an ideological take-over of the judiciary.

Liberal judges disregard the Constitution so our emails can be read without a warrant.  They misread the Constitution when holding we can’t step aside for two minutes on National Prayer Day but somehow decide that we still have to buy tax-payer funded copies of the Koran for Guantanamo detainees.  Oh and by the way, their next step is to allow warrantless cell phone tracking so Big Brother will know our whereabouts 24/7.

How’s that for intrusions on our civil liberties?  Where have all the Bush-haters gone?  If the lack of outcry from lefties purportedly valuing civil liberties is not the epitome of hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

COPYRIGHT 2010 JOHN M. ROGITZ