"Groundbreaker"
Here's my nomination for the story with the greatest blockbuster/more-than-meets-the-eye potential of the year. Yes, the report was duly noted over the weekend in various places, blogs included. But if the Bush administration did indeed plan a secret FISA end-around in February 2001 -- only a few weeks after Inauguration Day -- you don't need a natty Reynolds Wrap chapeau to start asking some appropriate questions, do you?
posted by The Cunning Realist at Monday, October 15, 2007
8 Comments:
Depends on how "hard" they put the lid on it.
They've gotten away with murder so far, why would this be different?
I've stopped watching for the tipping point.
I hope CR is right. One of the reader comments raising some pertinent questions right away:
1) Why the early interest in spying on Americans?
2) Why, given that interest, did the September 11 attacks succeed anyway?
My own question is: When are we gonna impeach, convict, and string up these two-bit fascists anyway?!?!
-- sglover
sglover, the answer is never. They've managed to make the Justice department a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party. Who's gonna pursue it, Democrats in Congress? I don't think so.
The scary part of it is that there is a not insignificant percentage of the U.S. population that thinks it's all just fine. This administration has somehow managed to change the DNA of this country. The Constitution has been relegated to a set of guidelines with loads of exceptions.
Well, you know that any government that levies an income tax is totalitarian. Our government has been totalitarian since the 16th amendment was ratified in 1913, and socialist since the 10th amendment was informally repealed in 1933. Most of what Uncle Sugar has been doing for the last seventy-odd years is unconstitutional. Why would anyone expect the federal leviathan to respect privacy rights?
Personally, I'm less worried about the government's eavesdropping on my rather boring phone conversations without a warrant than I am about the government's ability to "search" my home with a warrant based upon the unsupported word of an unidentified informant.
I don't agree that income tax = totalitarian, any more than I think "any tax at all" = totalitarian, but I do agree with your broader point that a whole hell of a lot that the government has been doing for a long time, things that we take for granted, are un-Constitutional. The Bush administration over these last 6 years or so has forced me to reevaluate a lot of my prior beliefs and assumptions about the way this country is governed. Bush and Cheney have taken things to an extreme, I would say to a uniquely dangerous extreme, but much of what they have done is nevertheless merely the continuation of trends that have long been present in our country. It's not as if Bush was the first, or second, or third, president to commit our military to war without Congressional declaration, for example, and that's just one of a zillion perversions of Constitutional government that Bush and company have perfected, but did not invent. We may roll back some of the worst elements of what has happened under this current regime, but no one paying attention to Hillary (to say nothing of the Republican contenders, with the exception of Ron Paul) can honestly believe she stands for a return to Constitutional government, or anything like it. She is okay with preventative war and the imperial executive-- she just thinks she would do a better job of it. And maybe she would, but that is hardly the point.
Was anyone even surprised? The destruction of the Constitution under the Bush II regime has been systematic. There is no way that this was not planned out beforehand.
I'm not saying that Bush II was behind 9/11 (who the hell knows what happened that day), but they did take advantage of our national shock to ram through legislation that changed our country. If there was no knowledge of the event before it happened, it sure was a God-send for their agenda.
I don't see any scenario that will restore the Constitution that could occur if Bush and Cheney remain in office, un-impeached, until January 20, 2009. The precedent that will be set for whichever Corporatist gets the White House next will be too much for our country to handle.
The United States my kids will grow up in (if I can justify having any) is going to look a lot different than the United States I grew up to love.
Pressure for impeachment, my friends! Let's save our country!
nice post, I love when I read the blogs and in the comments are a very good debate obuot the theme...
excellent
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