The Enemy Within

by digby

Following up on my post below featuring Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, I see that Josh Marshall made a similar argument, without the historical context, today also:

I think part of the issue for many people on the administration’s various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they’re the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don’t recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president’s will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.

The key here, I think, is to recognize that they will say that monitoring the communications of the press or political opponents is for the sake of national security. This is what comes of seeing your fellow Americans and political opponents as “enemies” to be eliminated. There is no logical or emotional leap to make between spying on terrorists in Dubai and spying on war protesters in Dubuque and spying on reporters in DC. It’s the natural result of this manichean mindset that openly touts a “with us or against us” philosophy and sees political dissent as acts of treason.

Conservatives have been selling the idea of “the enemy within” for many decades. It’s what they do. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as amply demonstrated in the excerpt of Perlstein’s book below, rationalized their spying on the press and dissenters as necessary to plug national security leaks. Likewise, the Bush administration will have no problem doing it either.

I personally wouldn’t support giving Gandhi and Jesus Christ the unfettered power to spy on Americans. But allowing these people to do it is unfathomable.

Update: Greg Sargent from TAPPED has a new blog called The Horse’s Mouth. He takes us down another trip through time, reminding us that Republicans have been trashing the press for generations.

(All this reminiscing about my youth is making me yearn for a bottle of Boones Farm Apple wine and a fat joint with seeds popping in it.)

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