Who is this woman, you ask? This is the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Latin America. She was a socialist guerrilla, arrested and imprisoned by a military dictatorship. After she was released, she went to school and became an economist. Who is this woman?

She is the sitting President of the up-and-coming country of Brazil.

Why am I speaking about Dilma Vana Rousseff today?

Because she has cancelled her yearly trip to the United States.

Why did she cancel her trip?

Because of Little Eddie’s revelations about the NSA spying on her and others in the Brazilian national oil company, Petrobas.

Why is the NSA spying on Brazil and Petrobas?

Apparently, because they say it’s necessary.

We can go through the back and forth relative to this, and I’m sure Brazilians aren’t the only one whose emails are being examined by ‘gran hermano’ (Big Brother in espanol). In Portuguese, older brother is irmao mas velho with a tilde over the first a…I know, TMI.

Here’s the point: who the devil do we think we are? I seriously doubt Congress had the depth and extent of spying in mind when they approved the much-abused Patriot Act back in 2001. It was passed as a knee-jerk reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center Buildings, in an attempt to prevent another. If the attack was a once in a millenium success, which I maintain it was, then we have given away our reputation as a world leader and gotten nothing but grief in return. And this time I cannot blame the hapless Republicans for this coup d’etat. The current administration has allowed – nay encouraged – the NSA to run roughshod over the rest of the world, civilized and otherwise. Maybe not overtly, but by being distracted by the nonsense being shoveled out in D.C. and not exercising real executive authority to rein in snooping.

But the interesting part of all this is: how has the NSA reacted to these damning revelations? Are they chagrined? Chastened? Concerned about the long term implications of other world leaders refusing to meet with the President? Nope. They are plugging the holes that gave Little Eddie access in the first place. They are not addressing the morality of their actions; they are trying to ensure we don’t know about what they intend to do next time.

But I have the solution (of course…) What is wanted here is the Point of View gun, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Oh, if only it could be held by an intelligent woman, and aimed at the collective set of ignorami that make choices about who to target for eavesdropping. What would be the result?

Boom!
(These would be the next set of words spoken by these dolts, in unison):

We have hidden behind non-existent threats to security to satisfy our need to control the uncontrollable. We must stop thinking like neanderthal cavemen and start realizing our broad-based data collection hurts more than it helps.

Pretty good, huh? Recall you don’t get more than a couple sentences from a guy hit by the POV gun, so you gotta hit him more than a few times to get a whole paragraph.

Boom!

We will admit to the world the depth and extent of our spying, and apologize to everyone we targeted unnecessarily, like Brazil, everyone in the EU and the penguins in Antarctica. We will discontinue this unnecessary monitoring and send flowers and a free pass to Disney World to Edward Snowden.

Wow, this is cool – one more, just for fun?

Boom!

Drones are bad and we’ll stop using them to blow up American citizens.

If only such a weapon of mass construction actually existed…