This diary over at DKOS illustrates why we should be worried about the administration asserting they are only targeting “the bad guys.”
We stood with about 50 others on rte 674 and when the motorcade came by there was assault rifle OUT the window pointing at ALL of us and the cars all looked like I remember seeing in the Hitler motorcades in the movies when I was a child, all boxy and black and one had the Pres seal and American flag on the sides. It was absolutely chilling!
[…]
Mary, Nic, and I were there as well; and yes, it went down exactly as Barbara and John have said below. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a sense of foreboding in my life as when I saw that automatic rifle pointed at us, peaceful protesters.
At the time September 11th happened, I worked at a military base near where I used to live before we moved to FL. Immediately after 9/11, our base was at Threatcon D, meaning that the military personnel guarding our base had to be armed. Yeah, I saw sharp-shooters and automatic rifles; but I took some kind of comfort in the notion that these measures were meant for the “bad guys.”
On Tuesday, the message that the sniper hanging out the window with his automatic weapon had for us was that we peacefully-protesting Americans were the “bad guys.” And that thought alone gave me the chills.
Which is exactly what they want us to feel. This isn’t about security, national or otherwise. It’s about intimidation.
The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith. They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less…
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.
The Salon piece is an excerpt of Michelle Goldberg’s new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism which looks to be a very useful introduction to the less well-known ultra-radical christianists whose ideas, a la Orcinus, get “mainstreamed” by more well-known political operatives like Falwell and Robertson.
Last night, I went to the annual dinner of a liberal group, and sat next to a very smart, very successful, and very well travelled man in his mid 60’s. I found him likable, talkative and in many ways, quite an interesting fellow.
He told us he supported the Bush/Iraq war because 9/11 was a wake-up call and it was inconceivable to him that the Bush administration would lie the United States into an invasion. Another reason: he had been in Cambodia and seen firsthand the capacity of human beings to do evil. Also, he said that during his lifetime, there was the Holocaust. If there was a chance to prevent that kind of horror from re-occurring, then he felt it was important to take that chance.
My mind started to reel from the effort of discerning what the connection was between Pol Pot’s atrocities and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Yes, they were both horrible and both were inflicted on innocents. But how did that lead one to conclude: “Invade Iraq?” And as catastrophic as the Holocaust was, I couldn’t figure out how the desire to prevent another such tragedy factored into his willingness to support the pre-emptive invasion and conquest of a country which, while brutal, had apparently given up gassing its citizens right around the time Donald Rumsfeld no longer was in a position to shake Saddam’s bloody hand.
There’s something about such reasoning that strikes me as profoundly illogical, as if history literally repeats itself and therefore we’re now getting a second chance to “get it right.” Time The Revelator (in Gillian Welch’s brilliant phrase) has other tricks up Her sleeve and never repeats, only cycles.
I tried to interrupt – as I said, he was talkative. But when he claimed that the Middle East had been “deadlocked for years,” I saw my chance, “What’s so bad about a deadlock? It certainly beats sheer chao…” and then he repeated everything in the first paragraph again. He seemed calm to me as he went through his reasons, but I noticed he spilled some wine on what looked to be a rather pricey shirt. He dropped his fork just a mite too loudly on his plate.
My friend on the other side managed to slip in, “Y’know, Tristero got it right from the start. He knew Bush was lying. He was right. And he was worried about the aftermath from the start.”
“So, you were right,” he said, a little bit of anger now creeping into his voice.
“Yes, I was right, and I knew I had to be right from the beginning, in 2002 and 2003,” I said, with not a trace of false modesty – or any other kind.
“Okay,” he rapidly wiped his lips with a napkin. “You know, a stopped watch is right twice a day.”
“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t a stopped watch about Iraq.”
Eyes blinked, but he didn’t skip a beat.
“Okay, you were right. I ‘ll grant you that. You were right when the rest of us were wrong…”
“Well, actually…” I was trying to tell him that in fact the majority of the world opposed the invasion and I was simply in the majority, but I couldn’t. He was angry and unstoppable.
“No, no, let me ask you a question. How come you, a musician, maybe a good one, maybe a well-read one, but a musician with no training in affairs of state – how come you of all people were right about Iraq but the most respected, most experienced, most intelligent, most serious thinkers in the United States got it wrong?”
“That is a question I ask myself every day, because it scares the daylights out of me,” I replied.
My eyes started to tear up and the winter of 02/03 raced through my head. That awful sense of dissociation watching every American media outlet try to outdo its rivals by printing lies, the unspeakable dread as I watched my country willingly go over the abyss. The shock of realizing that nearly everyone I knew had bought the myth of the Good War and that nothing I could say or do, nothing anyone could say or do could change their mind. It was too late.
I tried to say more, but I couldn’t, and then the subject changed and the dinner went on.
[Update: Link added to the great Gillian Welch’s album, Time (The Revelator), and my shameful misspelling of her name corrected. ]
In short, dear friends, it is not only a patriotic duty – nay, honor – for phone companies to turn over the records of these damned souls for data mining. It is a solemn spiritual obligation, a tithe, as it were. What mortal Verizon employee would dare risk damnation -ie, working for a bloody phone company for all eternity – by objectively defying the Will of the Lord?
One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of “known bad guys.”
Well, that’s good. I feel so relieved. But it sure would be nice to know what the criteria for “known bad guys” are. There are, after all, people who work for some security agencies who have some funny ideas:
“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”
And you just never know when somebody’s going to take it into their heads that it’s a threat to national security to dissent, do you? Why, it’s already happening:
The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation’s supposed “war profiteering.” The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street political theater,” Parkin says.
But that’s not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA’s role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon’s “terrorism threat warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.
The fact this administration continues to say “trust us, we’re only going after Al Qaeda” even though we already know they are tracking political dissenters is galling in the extreme. There is every reason to believe that the government that has instituted surveillance on protesters, that revealed the identity of a CIA agent for political purposes and that continues to characterize each revelation of their unconstitutional acts as a threat to national security will use this illegal NSA program to invade the privacy of Americans for political reasons. It’s insulting to the nation’s collective intelligence to suggest otherwise.
To this administration it’s “L’etat c’est moi.” If you are against the administration, you are against the country. Which means that 71% of Americans are unamerican.
With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.
“It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,” said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday.
[…]
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said the potential risk existed because the company’s technicians had intentionally built the machines in such a way that election officials would be able to update their systems in years ahead.
“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”
President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January.
Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” This trend has declined every month since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction. Iraq remains a key concern for the general public, as 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. The immigration debate also prompted 16% of Americans to consider it a top issue, down from 19% last month, but still sharply higher from 4% in March.
The Harris poll comes two days after a downbeat assessement of Bush in a New York Times/CBS News poll. The Times, in analyzing the results, said “Americans have a bleaker view of the country’s direction than at any time in more than two decades.”
Oh, and Jane says the Rove Grand Jury has been called tomorrrow. Fasten your seatbelts.
During the past five godawful years, I’ve tried as hard as I could, as a defense and therapy, to cultivate a zen-like attachment that is beyond shock. And yet, dammit, It’s simply impossible.
The moment I think the group of morons running amok in my country couldn’t possibly make bigger fools of themselves, they manage to surpass their previous idiocy by being more incompetent than anyone, not even I, could possibly imagine:
Inside Higher Ed reports that some people got together and went through David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America looking for errors. They found a bunch, of course, but by far the funniest one was the discovery that “While Horowitz’s book promises a list of the 101 most dangerous academics, he actually includes only 100.”
PZ Myers makes the excellent point that this means that those of us who are royally pissed that we weren’t included can assume it was just an inadvertent editing snafu (I’m no professor but I have taught at some good universities on occasion, and did my best to corrupt young minds by exposing them to leftist/liberal masterpieces like the Marriage of Figaro. Man, I so totally deserve to be 101.)
I love to bash the Bush hadministration as much as the next person, but all this talk about trashing the Bill of Rights has got to stop. The administration has a stellar record of protecting American’s civil liberties, even in the darkest early days, just a couple of months after 9/11. I’m sure you all remember this:
Ashcroft Blocks FBI Access to Gun Records
Critics Call Attorney General’s Decision Contradictory in Light of Terror Probe Tactics
By Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 7, 2001; Page A26
The FBI will not be permitted to compare the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told the Senate on December 6, offering no encouragement to senators willing to guarantee the FBI the authority to do so.
Defending his decision to block the FBI from using gun documents in its terror probe, Ashcroft said the law does not allow investigators to review the federal records created when a buyer applies to purchase a weapon at a gun store.
Some critics charged that Ashcroft’s strong opposition to gun control is interfering with his role as the government’s top cop. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing him of “handcuffing” the FBI, pressed him unsuccessfully to say why he did not seek access to gun records when he claimed expanded investigatory powers after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked Ashcroft whether he wants the power to review gun records in the fight against terrorism, Ashcroft replied that he would not comment on a “hypothetical.”
Bush administration officials said information collected by gun stores for use in background checks was not intended for other law enforcement purposes. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the administration is following a regulation signed in January by Attorney General Janet Reno, who ruled that records can be used only to audit the background check system.
Such regulations are easily changed, countered Clinton administration officials and other critics. They pointed out that Ashcroft has issued an order permitting federal investigators to listen to attorney-client conversations and sought to lengthen the time illegal immigrants can be held before being charged. At his request, Congress has granted many other powers in recent months.
When you hear all these shrieking moonbats going on and on about the Republicans shredding the constitution, remind them of this. When the whole nation was losing its head, the Bush justice department kept its eye on the ball. Their priorities were straight. It is better that a hundred terrorists have an arsenal than even one citizens’ gun buying records are saved long enough to compare them to a terrorist watch list. That’s the kind of integrity this administration has.
So why should we suspect them of using these illegal wiretaps for partisan purposes? When it comes to fighting terrorists, the Bush administration has never played politics.
