Thursday, December 22, 2005
None Dare Call It Fascism.
Police have been infiltrating peaceful protests by American citizens, even acting as provocateurs.
The president of the United States authorized--perhaps illegally--the NSA to spy on Americans.
We suspect the more that's learned about these incidents and their wider implications the more vague the arguments in their defense will become, until at last the right will be speaking in tongues while waving flags.
The lessons the rest of us learned from Watergate and Vietnam were about the failures of leadership. The lesson Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned was that if they'd been able to control the message they'd have gotten away with it.
Thirty years later the right controls the message, and Cheney and Rumsfeld can get away with anything. Anything. We're at the point where the New York Times won't tell its readers that the executive branch is spying on Americans without warrants. They held that news through his reelection, and only came clean when someone on their staff was about to tell the world that it was going on--and that the Times knew about it.
The Times' own story on the NSA dropped off their front page in less than a day. It was a headline for a brief period last night; to find it today one has to scroll down to the sections listing, click on "Washington", then scroll down THAT page to find it. All previous stories on the domestic spying revelation are gone from the online paper, save one on Cheney's defense of the practice. For that story one has to scroll almost to the bottom of the "Washington" page.
And yet from North Carolina today comes a letter (posted as a comment on the 12/20/05 201k post) that this is all "just partisan politics" and, heck, Clinton knew, too, and besides, Saddam tried to kill Bush's daddy.
The mother of a dear friend escaped Poland during the Blitz, eventually ending up here in Boston. We always feared that her dark judgments--that "the world is an evil place--good may sometimes win but evil will always catch up" might be true.
But we never imagined that Americans would march to the municipal abattoir meekly, willingly, stupidly--like cattle.
The president of the United States authorized--perhaps illegally--the NSA to spy on Americans.
We suspect the more that's learned about these incidents and their wider implications the more vague the arguments in their defense will become, until at last the right will be speaking in tongues while waving flags.
The lessons the rest of us learned from Watergate and Vietnam were about the failures of leadership. The lesson Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned was that if they'd been able to control the message they'd have gotten away with it.
Thirty years later the right controls the message, and Cheney and Rumsfeld can get away with anything. Anything. We're at the point where the New York Times won't tell its readers that the executive branch is spying on Americans without warrants. They held that news through his reelection, and only came clean when someone on their staff was about to tell the world that it was going on--and that the Times knew about it.
The Times' own story on the NSA dropped off their front page in less than a day. It was a headline for a brief period last night; to find it today one has to scroll down to the sections listing, click on "Washington", then scroll down THAT page to find it. All previous stories on the domestic spying revelation are gone from the online paper, save one on Cheney's defense of the practice. For that story one has to scroll almost to the bottom of the "Washington" page.
And yet from North Carolina today comes a letter (posted as a comment on the 12/20/05 201k post) that this is all "just partisan politics" and, heck, Clinton knew, too, and besides, Saddam tried to kill Bush's daddy.
The mother of a dear friend escaped Poland during the Blitz, eventually ending up here in Boston. We always feared that her dark judgments--that "the world is an evil place--good may sometimes win but evil will always catch up" might be true.
But we never imagined that Americans would march to the municipal abattoir meekly, willingly, stupidly--like cattle.
