Read of the day: Sharyl Attkisson knocks one out of the park with devastating analogy

Thomas Lifson  "Sometimes an analogy is the best way to change minds.  Commitment to one side in a debate can lock minds into a framework.  But take the same principles and apply them to an analogous situation where the locked in prejudices don't apply, and the blinders can fall away.

"That is exactly what Ms. Attkisson has done with a column in The Hill.  She takes on the ridiculous reasoning applied to justifying the FBI spying on the Trump campaign and applies it to bank robbery.  She begins:

Once upon a time, the FBI said some thugs planned to rob a bank in town.  Thugs are always looking to rob banks.  They try all the time.  But at this particular time, the FBI was hyper-focused on potential bank robberies in this particular town.

The best way to prevent the robbery – which is the goal, after all – would be for the FBI to alert all the banks in town.  "Be on high alert for suspicious activity," the FBI could tell the banks.  "Report anything suspicious to us.  We don't want you to get robbed."

Instead, in this fractured fairytale, the FBI followed an oddly less effective, more time-consuming, costlier approach.  It focused on just one bank.  And, strangely, it picked the bank that was least likely to be robbed because nobody thought it would ever get elected president – excuse me, I mean, because it had almost no cash on hand.  (Why would robbers want to rob the bank with no cash?)

Stranger still, this specially-selected bank the FBI wanted to protect above all others happened to be owned by a man who was hated inside and outside the FBI.

So, to protect this bank owned by the guy the FBI hated, the FBI secretly examined a list of bank employees and identified a few it claimed would be likely to help robbers – or, at least, would not stop a robbery.  How did it select these targets?  By profiling them based on their pasts.

These particular bank employees, the FBI said, were chosen because they worked long ago with customers who might have known bank robbers in the past – maybe not the particular robbers planning a bank robbery this time, but different people who knew people who were thought to have robbed banks in the past ... or, perhaps, people who thought of robbing banks at some point but never got around to it. 

"It gets even better, making the absurdities of the justifications for the spying obvious.  Read the whole thing."