A Bad Day Among Many
john posted in politics & culture on March 14th, 2006
Last week, Congress re-approved the Patriot Act, cravenly caved on the NSA domestic spying affair, and blew spittle over each other in their haste to act outraged over some obscure business deal involving Dubai, port operations, and the usual bucket of money. They said they ‘got a lot of mail about the ports’. Of course later it turned out that almost all port operations are run by foreign companies.
Helllooooo!
Half the voters think one or both of the last two presidential elections was stolen. The courts are looking into the off-year gerrymandering of Texas, which delivered the house into Republican hands. We are stuck in a foreign civil war that’s costing us lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Nobody is doing anything about that, are they?
You can remind me that this sort of shenanigans is the nature of democracies and republics, you can point out that Roosevelt and Wilson may have gone further astray in unconstitutional tactics. Then again, maybe not. We’ll nod sagely and remember Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and shut down newspapers. Well, to repeat a cliche, Bush is no Lincoln or Roosevelt or Wilson.
We’ve been through these national tantrums before: usually, citing extraordinary circumstance, the executive grabs for power, and each time is eventually reined in. But I can argue that the extraordinary circumstance this time around is government overreaching itself. There’s no Al Queda terrorism crisis. Al Queda is just a bogeyman thrown up to scare Soccer Moms and Nascar Dads into line. Meanwhile, Washington fiddles while nuclear proliferation spins out of control.
In each case of executive arrogation before, there was a real crisis that passed, or eventually men of moral courage stood up against the attack on our freedoms. Ominously, McCarthy was just a junior Senator, had no actual evidence, and still was able to do quite a lot of damage. Men I consider stronger than our current crop of ethical midgets, men like Eisenhower and Truman, did not shut him down. Now we have low-flying moderates like Senator Olympia Snowe and her colleagues agreeing to a spineless compromise allowing continued unsupervised domestic surveillance. Today the rot is deep within the power structure of at least two branches of government, and possibly now in the court as well. Where is the reaction? Where is the moral courage? Private citizens are outraged, disgusted, and angry, but nothing happens.
Perhaps this too shall pass, but I have lost another little bit of hope.