Warrantless Wiretaps

I haven't commented much about the Cheney/Bush torture policy, and now this business about the wiretaps. All of this is beyond what reasonable people can disagree about.  It has come to a point where I find it all but impossible to even engage in conversation with people who would still support this administration.  It's beyond rational argument at this point. 

Human beings have a limitless capacity for self-justification.  People can talk themselves into anything. And people do not rise to positions of power who have not honed their capacity for self-decception and the deception of others into a highly developed skill.  They are expert seducers of the mind. And while such seducers need to be given a fair hearing, at some point the gavel has to come down. The time for argument is over.

There comes a time where a line is crossed, and you have to stand on one side or the other. For me this administration crossed the line some time ago. But now there is no excuse, given all that we know about this administration, for any one who thinks it has any moral legitimacy.  I can deal with such people now as I would someone who has joined a cult.  One can only hope sooner or later such a person will come to his senses.  But rational argument is pointless.

I always thought that Iran/Contra was a far more serious case of the government's abuse of power than Watergate, and now we are finding out that this administration is setting all-time lows for power abuse. It seems as if every time we get a Republican government in the White House, it feels compelled to outdo  previous GOP administrations in abusing our democracy. 

It's shameful.  It's so exceedingly shameful, we haven't taken the full measure of it yet.  In part it's  because Republicans are socialized to feel shame only about sex.  Greed and abuses of power?  That's just healthy ambition. That's just looking after one's interests.  And so the truth is that we're in some kind of denial that things could be as bad as they are. We're living in a fun house hall of mirrors where the perverse is distorted to seem normal and the normal distorted to seem perverse. 

The Republican Party at the national level has come to represent everything that is worst in the American character. It really has. From its slick, corporate country club elites like Bill Frist to its rapacious rednecks like Tom Delay, this party has presented the ugliest face of America to the world since the Nixon Administration. The Democrats are bad, but the Republicans are just plain scary awful. 

Three more years.  Think of it.  God help us if we are attacked again. It will be bad enough to sustain the horrors that will accompany such an attack. But even worse will be the abuses perpetrated by the operatives within this administration who long to turn our country into a police state.  They are checked for the time being.  The U.S. Senate found enough backbone to say No to torture and to the Patriot Act.  But  they will regroup, and we have not seen the last of them by a long shot.

Comments

[forestwalker]

Always so encouraging Jack! :)

My thoughts were much the same last night after listening to the President's national address. Did a psy-op team write his speech, or what? That was the most Orwellian speech I've ever heard but I still sensed that it will be effective on some of his only-recent doubters.

[Jack Whelan]

Forest:

The polls would seem to indicate that the speech di have it intended effect. But to elaborate, here's a comment I'm pasting in that I wrote over at Ambivablog:

It has become clearer to me in the last year that the mistake we make is to take the war, or the question of torture, or wiretaps, or oil drilling, or social security, or welfare, or Alito's nomination--or whatever--in isolation and argue their pros and cons as if we're in some high school civics debate.

One issue cannot be considered except in relation to the others. They are all connected; all these policies have their roots in the same corrupt agenda. It's not a question about agreeing with Bush about this but disagreeing about that. We have learned too much to think in this way. This administration and everything it stands for crossed a line a long time ago, and now it must be resisted root and branch.

It works to the advantage of their agenda that they can play upon the decency and good will of the American citizenry, that they can take an issue and isolate it and make a reasonable case for it. Reasonable people can disagree--right? But such debates keep us distracted. We get caught up in the ins and outs of the single issue and miss the big picture. And the big picture is that these people are dangerous, and they are destroying our democracy. We don't yet know the half of it.

Nothing that the people in this administration says can be taken at face value. The human wit is capable of justifying anything, no matter how horrifying. Any presentation of a reasonable facade is a smokescreen designed to obfuscate and confuse. They are seducers; they are telling us what we want to hear, and nothing, nothing they say, no matter how reasonable sounding, should be believed. They long ago gave up any claim they should have on us to be given the benefit of the doubt.

And at this point, after everything we have learned about this administration and its mendacity and its abuses, there is no longer any excuse. To be seduced means to collude. They must be resisted root and branch.

[Michael Primont]

All that’s left to say by me is – Amen. You hit it square on the head.

I think that this spring may be the time when citizens will take to the streets in numbers not seen since Vietnam.

I suspect that there are far worse things going on in the government that we don’t know about yet.

My first thought when the story broke about the wiretapping was that I had been stripped of my capacity for outrage. My response was, “Oh, of course, what else would you expect of Bush & Co.?” I think that historians will be writing stories worthy of the National Enquirer after Bush departs from the scene. I can only imagine what Cheney has been up to all this time. He’s kept a low public profile, except for speeches at country clubs and military bases. Last week, Colin Powell told the BBC that Cheney and Rumsfeld went behind everybody’s back to goad Bush into war. Wait until he and others feel free to vent when Bush is no longer president. Of course, none of this does us or the world any good right now, but thinking about it is a small consolation.

In our lifetime, politics in America has been ruled by fear. First the cold war. Then, when that dried up, Bush the first had the country talking about Willie Horton. Last but not least, Iraq/terrorism. Clinton was a exception. He chose not to govern by fear. “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” was his theme. He really did practice the politics of hope in his campaigning and his governing. Bush, as I know you agree, is the worst by a measurable degree. He has fear and nothing else. Empty fear, which he and his cohorts magnify and amplify any chance they get.

[forestwalker]

I always knew you were just a Bush hater Jack. ;)

[Michael Constans]

Just in case you needed cheerful thoughts to wrap up 2005:
Over on Salon.com Peter Dau has a post on the Dynamics of a Bush scandal which I think all too accurately presents the reasons why outrage over wiretaps won't translate into breaking the Bush stranglehold on power.

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=a6da2e05-c808-4f7e-9ab2-3d2a01a82a15