It turns out the Little Red Book Story was a hoax. Thank Goodness. But lest anyone think that this means anything, check this out:
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
[…]
“There was a lot of discussion about the switches” in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. “You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that.”
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
That’s what we all thought. TIA Redux. Which means they have likely been sifting through millions of Americans’ communications, with the acquiescence of your friendly neighborhood phone and internet provider, looking for keywords, patterns … well, we don’t know, now do we, because it’s all done with no oversight. They could be looking for signs of illicit blow jobs, which is, as we all know, a major threat to the republic.
I would not expect that this mining is quite as sophisticated as we might like. After all, we are surveilling Quakers and PETA because they are terrorist threats so I wouldn’t look for the NSA to have some mind boggling, science fiction level capabilities to sort out the person who is discussing current events from the terrorist trying to kill us all.
Oh well. If you don’t want to be a suspect, just don’t use your phone or computer. Or the US mail. Or an airplane. Or a library. And if you do use those things, just don’t say anything that a computer might interpret to be a threat. Is that so hard? Use your heads, people. This is what we have to do to preserve our freedom.
Lots of people are discussing this article about Kos in the new Washington Monthly and wondering whether we need more wonkery and less partisanship in the blogosphere.
It seems to me that there is a lot of great accessible policy analysis in the left blogosphere. Max Sawicky notes that that wonkery rises to the occasion when needed, as in the social security debate (and, I would argue, Juan Cole and other foreign policy specialists when Iraq debates have raged.) Specialists abound. There is political wonkery in the form of analysts like Ruy Teixeira at Donkey Rising. Nathan Newman is the go to on labor issues. PZ Myers and Chris Mooney on science. Economists and lawyers abound, Maxspeak, Angry Bear, Balkinization, Talk Left, Scotusblog, the list goes on. TPM Cafe is a salon devoted to wonkery.
And within the wonkosphere there are generalists and specialists, more often the latter, for obvious reasons. Kevin Drum is a generalist wonk. He has many interests that he enjoys exploring with graphs and data. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias do too. Most blogwonks aren’t like that. (You’ll notice that all three of those guys are employed by liberal magazines that specialize in popular wonkery.)
These and the many great blogwonks are essential to the left blogosphere. They are a tremendous resource that I (a card carrying partisan crank) treasure and I link to them more often than anyone else. They are often compelling writers who effectively convey complex information to the lay reader and offer excellent analysis. So I’m not sure I see the beef. I rarely find it difficult to get educated on any number of subjects when I need to (which is often.)
Having said that, I disagree that the rest of the blogsphere is a bunch of screaming hysterics who engage in nothing but “agitation” or partisan catcalling. They all discuss politics — you’re not a member of the left blogsphere if you don’t — and they discuss the subject in different ways with analysis, humor, polemic, grassroots activism, criticism and historical perspective. The big blogs like Kos and Atrios have created virtual communities within the larger community for people to gather and talk about the issues of the day. And that, believe it or not, is the essence of politics.
In the Politics Aristotle said:
“That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain, and man alone among the animals has speech….[S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.”
Politics is way more than wonkery, although wonkery is essential. And the partisan catcalling is a natural part of it, particularly in highly polarized times such as this. It’s human, for better or worse. People need to find solidarity and they need to express their fears, frustrations, desires, needs and beliefs. People turn to bloggers and each other to connect the dots and connect to others.
Wonkery is reason. The comaraderie we find among those of our online political tribe is heart. Successful politics requires both. I’ve often felt that one of the problems with liberalism is that we lost touch with that side of ourselves — as Ezra has called it, our “inner RFK” — the part that gets inspired (or angry) because we deeply believe in something.
Our technocratic side is far superior for actual governance, as we’ve recently been shown in spades. But it is a grave mistake to think that politics is, or ever has been, fueled by a concept like “competence.” It’s fueled by much bigger concepts like “leadership” and “inspiration” and “committment.” We need some of that stuff, badly.
So I say hooray for the wonkosphere and the crankosphere. I know that each side sometimes offends the sensibilities of the other but we should warmly embrace our bretheren no matter what our temperaments incline us to. Robust progressive politics requires both.
Speaking of media malfesance, here’s a barn burner of a post by Avedon Carol on the alleged “even-handedness” of the press.
The so-called “objectivity” we are seeing today is very different from what we saw 30 years ago, for the simple reason that when you refuse to acknowledge that one side is telling the truth while the other is lying, that’s not objective. Objectively, Bush lied and Gore didn’t, but you’d never have known that from the mainstream media’s coverage of the 2000 campaign. Objectively, there is no more important thing to do in an election than make sure everyone can vote and then count all the ballots, but you wouldn’t have known that, either.
In that regard, I have to give some props to Andrea Mitchell today sitting in for Chris Matthews. She actually did call glassy-eyed Governor Bill Owen of Colorado out on his RNC mandated stream of consiousness blather about “Aldrich Ames – Brooklyn bridge – Jamie Gorelick – known terrorists – protecting America – 9/11 – Clintoncarterdemocrats.” She said outright that what he was saying wasn’t true.
The problem is that the Republican machine is like the Borg. They only have one brain. Owen did not compute her factual rebuttal; he just repeated his mantra, calmly and cooly, because he doesn’t really know what he’s saying — he’s just reading from the approved script. He has no idea what’s true and what isn’t and he doesn’t care.
I’d like to welcome Andrea Mitchell into the reality based community. Maybe she’ll stay awhile.
Commenter francesangeles spotted this article by Richard Morin, the angry WaPo pollster, from just the other day:
Finally, an explanation for why bar bets sometimes escalate into bar fights: Levels of a “high-octane” form of testosterone soar when men think others don’t trust them.
When I saw the picture attached to the article, I realized that I had seen Richard Morin interviewed by Fox’s Bill Hemmer yesterday about the president’s exciting new poll numbers. I commented to the cat how bizarre it was that the guy appeared to be so happy, almost giddy, about it. (Fleaber agreed that the guy’s affect was downright euphoric.) If anyone has footage, let me know.
I think we might be dealing with a straight-up kool-aider.
For a connect-the-Bush-atrocities, with heavy linkage, check out this post at HuffPo by Joshua Bearman. It makes a nice Christmas e-mail for your Republican relatives:
It would be one thing if we were safer. But our modern day Sun King cloaks his seizure of power in so much poll-tested national security language despite that he is not, in fact, protecting us at all. The residents of the three cities Bush cited voted overwhelmingly against him because they rightly sensed that Bush’s reckless foreign adventures and lack of a real domestic security policy MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE. It doesn’t take much critical analysis to figure out why. Here is a guy who, after September 11, failed to increase funding for nuclear non-proliferation, which the non-partisan commission the President himself appointed called the single greatest threat to our safety. Collecting the world’s loose nukes was the first thing on my mind on September 12th, 2001, so I’m a little confused as why it’s taken the President four years to catch on.
Then there’s Iraq, where Bush has decided to throw away $200+ billion — money that could have paid for an entire wish list of domestic security programs. Right now, our own military, fueled by Bush’s swaggering cowboy routine has become the most effective recruiting tool for anti-American sentiment and insurgents in Iraq. If you find that to be a subjective assessment, here’s a joint study by the Israeli and Saudis (!) that quantifies the Iraq Effect. And who doesn’t recall Rumsfeld accidentally wondering aloud if the insurgents weren’t replacing their numbers faster than our troops could ever kill them?
“To protect us”?
Is that why the 9/11 Commission’s report card earlier this month had a single “A” out of 41 categories, while the bottom was filled out with 12 “D”s and 5 “F”s? The President got a “D” on Securing WMD’s, the supposed reason we’re stirring up the hornets’ nest in Iraq. Commission member and former republican governor of Illinois James Thompson said it straight: “Are we crazy? Why aren’t our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives?”
Last night I wrote post called “Adults Wanted” and a reader sent me a link to this essay called “Confessions of a Repentant Republican” which is an extremely cogent, precise and lucid critique of the current administration’s policies from the perspective of someone who understands the enlightenment principles that undergird our system. He speaks in terms that transcend politics and go far beyond our current partisan obsessions.
Here’s an excerpt:
Americans, with broad bipartisan support, have not only embedded our unambiguous rejection of torture into American law (establishing legal constraints which the Bush administration is now determined to dismantle), but have for generations been in the forefront of establishing such standards worldwide through treaties including the Geneva Conventions.
Similarly, previous generations of Americans – left, right, and center – have been unified in the belief that not only is such conduct essential for the safety of our own captured servicemen and women, but that any nation which does not adhere to its own basic values (regardless of any self-proclaimed virtue) would cease to possess the moral prerequisites for genuine success.
Our present need for “the decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is no less compelling than it was for our founders. But the primary need for realigning our actions with our values is not improved public relations. The most compelling need is, for the benefit of our own society, to reaffirm moral constraints upon our actions, individual and collective, without which the character of our nation will be diminished.
Accomplishing this can only be done by reframing the issues in a manner which befits our Judeo-Christian and American values.
This will be contentious. The unifying values implanted by America’s founders – values of liberty, non-aggression, and antipathy to authoritarian government; have historically prevailed only despite significant opposition from Americans with less honorable priorities. Indeed, the very eloquence with which Jefferson, Madison, and other founders defended civil liberties and warned repeatedly of the dangers of unrestrained executive power and the pernicious consequences of war and empire is primarily because their views were not universal. Their beliefs in liberty, defended by non-aggressive, anti-imperial foreign policy, and the right of dissent have survived to become the “common ground” of the American civic vision only after bitter and divisive political battles. During such times these cherished principles – now universally claimed (even those whose oppose the substance of their beliefs claim them rhetorically as their own) and taken for granted have not infrequently been severely threatened.
Today the rhetoric of this consensus American vision of liberty and non-aggression remains unscathed. But the substance of the beliefs of our founders (which constitutes the basic common ground of our political compact) is under assault. Certainly no one overtly challenges our commitment to liberty and democracy. Yet we witness proponents of freedom at home and abroad advocating perpetual military occupation, rationalizing permanent detention of American citizens without charges or trial, and those who claim to respect the rule of law remaining silent while administration lawyers concoct methods for the president to evade American legal prohibitions of torture and promote the legal theory that the president has the inherent authority to set aside American law.
This being the web, it’s always possible that this person is a Democrat in disguise but I don’t think so. His critique hinges on the idea that isolationsim is inherently American, and that is bedrock conservative of the old school, not liberal of the new school.
His critique is something that I had expected more “adult” Republicans to come to by now, to tell you the truth — the people I think many of us expected were peppered throughout the ruling class and who would step up if the kids got out of hand. Sadly, it seems that most of them are either dying out or have become consumed by the partisan war that saps so much strength from all of us.
I urge you to read his entire essay. Even though he considers himself part of the “anti-war” majority, progressive intellectuals will undoubtedly disagree with some of it. But he lays out the argument around which people of good will who value the basic fundamental principles of our constitutional system might be able to find consensus. I just don’t know how many of those people are out there.
Following up the post below about the White house polling operation, Paul Lukasiak in the comments notices another dimension to this problem that I missed and it’s very interesting:
The Post had no problem asking this question as far back as March 2005
17. (IF DECREASED, Q16) Should all U.S. forces in Iraq be withdrawn immediately, or should they be decreased, but not all withdrawn immediately?
Now, at that time (and to this day) NO Democratic Congressional Leader or Serious Presidential Candidate was advocating “immediate withdrawal” — this was just the Bush “cut and run” straw man representation of the Democratic position.
The Post does not bother to formulate questions based on proposals advanced by leading Democrats — there is no question about Murtha’s actual proposal (phased redeployment over 6 month period when “practicable with a significant “over the horizon” presence) or withdrawal formulas offered by people like Kerry (withdraw 10,000 american troops for every 30,000 Iraqi troops that are trained.)
Furthermore, the Post is quite comfortable advancing White House straw man arguments using the “some people” method, as in this question asked starting in August…
“18. Some people say the Bush administration should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further casualties. Others say knowing when the U.S. would pull out would only encourage the anti-government insurgents. Do you yourself think the United States should or should not set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq?”
This was a truly insidious question — “some people say” that the presence of US forces only exacerbates and strengthens the insurgency, and that apparently includes the vast majority of Iraqis who want us out. But you don’t get that information in the question — the only “reason” for setting a deadline is “reduction of casualties.” (Not to mention the fact that no Democratic leader was saying “set a firm deadline” in August 2005….)
The reality is that the Post doesn’t ask about impeachment because asking the question legitimizes the idea of impeachment — and the Post is too beholden to the White House to permit that to happen.
This cuts to the heart of the matter. When the Washington Post (or others) ask a question, it legitimizes the question. Back in that poll in 1998, just five days after the story broke. The imnpetus for taking it was not that “serious” people were talking impeachment, it was just that “some” people were talking impeachment. And those people, with te exception of the silly George Stephanolopulos, were beltway Republicans.
Matt at MYDD today notes another example of egregious WaPo polling:
From the Washington Post’s polling director Richard Morin’s online chat yesterday:
New York, N.Y.: When a newspaper like The Post commissions a poll, it gives the result prominent play, usually on the front page. But when a different organization conducts a separate poll, that poll’s results are given much less prominent play, and often not mentioned at all. The implicit assumption is, “Our poll is better than theirs.” Is this sound journalism?
Richard Morin: See the last answer. It would be unsound journalism to ignore other survey results, particularly if they offer insights your own may lack. But to give them as prominent play? No, and I think it is unreasonable to expect us to
.
The Washington Post put on their front page a story by Richard Morin titled ‘Majority of Americans Support Alito Nomination’. A Fox News poll just showed Alito with cratering approval ratings. Morin’s story clearly ignores other survey results which present completely different findings, something he just called unsound. It’s clear this is not an isolated incident – Chris just documented Morin’s failure to live up to standards he sets for himself.
The Washington Post polling operation has a problem. They are clearly responsive to GOP pressure in their questioning and yet they get angry at what they see as coordinated Democratic pressure. Morin even insulted a member of the public for using a copy and paste e-mail to complain about polling.
Most recently, a psychology professor from Arizona State University sent me the copy-and-paste e-mail, not a word or comma was changed. I only hope his scholarship is more original.
We first laughed about it. Now, four waves into this campaign,we are annoyed. Really, really annoyed.
Some free advice: You do your cause no service by organizing or participating in such a campaign. It is viewed by me and others with the same scorn reserved for junk mail. Perhaps a bit more.
First they laugh and then they get angry. Does he assume that these aren’t real people, that they are fakes, paid shills, that they don’t believe what they are saying because the language has been cut and pasted? If each e-mail were originally composed would it make a difference? It doesn’t seem so. It’s the fact that a web-site encouraged average people to complain to the Washington Post about something those people clearly agreed was a problem. Why is that deserving of laughter and annoyance? Did he take the time to think, even once, about the substance of the complaint? If it had been lodged by a high level Republican would he have laughed and then been annoyed?
A parade of operatives and politicians go on television every day spouting robotic talking points ad nauseum and nobody says that they are illegitimate. And nobody does it more effectively than the GOP. Frank Luntz proudly and openly discusses the fact that he tells his GOP clients exactly how to phrase things. Newt Gingrich wrote the book on repeating emotional phrases over and over to paint the opposition in derisive terms.
It’s quite obvious that the Republicans have staged a quarter century “campaign” to sway media coverage. Now that they are in power they marshall very heavy hitters to lodge complaints and they go right to the top. John Harris and Len Downie admitted last week that high level Republicans and the White House complain all the time and they go out of their way to allay those complaints.
I*’ll use the same example of how this works that I used in a post last week. I’m sure the same thing happens at the Post:
Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC…
Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?
Russert: I haven’t gone into it,–you know-publicly-cause I just didn’t want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that’s why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.
So when a “viewer” from the White House complains it gets referred to the president of NBC News. WaPo editor Len Downie says “We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin’s column because it contains opinion.”
Yet when readers and viewers from around the country complain via a web campaign, the recipients view their complaints with the “same scorn that is reserved for junk mail, maybe more.”
It’s quite clear that the mainstream media think that their readers are irrelevant when it comes to political coverage. Perhaps this explains why so many people find the mainstream media increasingly irrelevant.
Update: Here’s the link to the Democrats.com post that asked people to contact the major media outlets and ask why they were refusing to ask the question when the Rasmussen and Zogby polls were showing a rather large number of Americans supporting impeachment. I don’t know why this should be considered illegitimate — especially when political editor John Harris uses a friend’s enjoyment of Dan Froomkin’s column as evidence of Froomkin’s liberal bias.
Jane reports on Richard Morion pollster for the Washington Post actually had the temerity to write this drivel yesterday in an online chat:
Naperville, Ill.: Why haven’t you polled on public support for the impeachment of George W. Bush?
Richard Morin: This question makes me mad…
Seattle, Wash.: How come ABC News/Post poll has not yet polled on impeachment?
Richard Morin: Getting madder…
Haymarket, Va.: With all the recent scandals and illegal/unconstitutional actions of the President, why hasn’t ABC News / Washington Post polled whether the President should be impeached?
Richard Morin: Madder still…
[…]
[W]e do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion –witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in ’08 are calling for Bush’s impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls.
A January 1998 Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked the following questions:
“If this affair did happen and if Clinton did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”
“There are also allegations that Clinton himself lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman. If Clinton lied in this way, would you want him to remain in office as president, or would you want him to resign the presidency?”
“If Clinton lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman, and he did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”
Morin was the Post’s polling director at the time, and he wrote the January 26, 1998, article reporting the poll results.
I just have to expand on this a little because this is a truly unbelievable example of media bias. In an impeachment story in the Washington Post written the same day as the poll was released, January 26, Ruth Marcus breathlessly reported:
In the whirlwind five days since the story first broke, nothing has been conclusively proven about the truth of the allegations that Clinton had an affair with Lewinsky, urged her to lie about it in an affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and then lied about it himself under oath when questioned by Jones’s lawyers.
But it is a measure of the political and legal explosiveness of the allegations that they immediately provoked discussions of impeachment, a prospect raised the morning the story broke by former presidential adviser George Stephanopoulos and discussed at length on yesterday’s TV talk shows.
It was discussed on all the talk shows because useful idiot George Stephanopoulos brought it up five days before and the Republican Borg immediately fanned out across the airwaves and pretended that this sexual affair was a threat to the Republic. And the Washington post ate it up with a spoon, sending out their pollster post-haste to take the public’s temperature on this trumped up piece of tabloid garbage.
Today, the same pollster gets mad when people bring up the idea of impeachment in the context of a hugely unpopular president lying about national security. He gets madder still at regular Americans who annoy him with mass e-mails which he obviously considers less legitimate than a gaggle of paid GOP shills marching in lockstep on Press The Meat. This, even though the current polling already shows that 52% of the public believe that Bush deliberately misled the country on Iraq and 56% think that it is very important for congress to question the Bush Adminstration about the way the intelligence was used. (Clinton had a 59% approval rating in that 1998 poll.)
Please explain WHY a question asking if President Bush should be impeached if he lied to the country about war is “biased”.
Please also explain how this is consistent with polls the Post ran — under your direction, I might add — in 1998 asking whether then-President Clinton should be impeached if he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Do you now believe those questions you asked — and reported on — throughout 1998 were “biased”? If so, do you believe you and The Post owe Clinton an apology?
Why does The Post think it is appropriate to raise the spectre of impeachment when there is a Democratic president, but not when there is a Republican in office?
Because the beltway press corps has conditioned itself to respond only to Republicans. They’ve trained themselves not take Democrats seriously, either the rank and file who inconvenience them with e-mails they do not want to read, or the leadership they simply disdain. Unpopularity obligates them to criticize Bush at least mildly, but the relief they feel when his numbers edge up a bit is palpable. They don’t seem to know this about themselves.
And although they will likely continue to choose to avert their eyes, impeachment is on the table.
Kevin Drum has a whole bunch of good posts up today discussing the right wing reaction to the spying scandal. A more reprehensible group of moral and intellecutual cowards I have never seen.
There are the typical lies and obfuscations to which we’ve all become accustomed, of course, such as selectively citing passages of Supreme Court opinions that actually came to opposite conclusions and purposefully misconstruing Clinton and Carter’s executive orders to imply that they had done the same thing. That’s just par for the course.
But there are two things about this that do chap my hide and they are related. The first is that for 40 years — and certainly for the last 25 since Reagan became president — we have had to listen to endless blathering about how the Republicans want to “get the government out of your lives.” “If someone says ‘we’re the government and we’re here to help you’ you should run.” Rugged individualist Republicans, taking care of their own, not looking to the state to solve their problems like the betwetting girly men and manly girls on the left.
During the 90’s the atmosphere was redolent with militia fevered, anti-government rhetoric that echoed throughout the right wing message infrastructure. Here’s a snippet of the zeitgeist of the Gingrich revolution:
My books, such as Circle of Intrigue, Big Sister is Watching You, and Project L.U.C.I.D., tell the absolute truth about the evil powers of intimidation. It documents the crimes and schemes of the black-hooded, jackbooted thugs of the BATF and many other federal Gestapo, alphabet agencies. This hidden elite constitute the true Nazis. In fact, as fascists, they are worse than Nazis. They are “CommuNazis!”
Once upon a time, America had law enforcement of which it could be proud. No more. Today, the BATF, CIA, FBI and other federal bureaucracies continue to drag the good name of law enforcement through the gutter. As my friend, Officer Jack McLamb, recently said in a World of Prophecy interview, “The scum of law enforcement has risen to the top.”
“The problem,” says McLamb, “is that God is gone from government.”
These were extremists, to be sure, but the language on the floor of the congress often echoed this kind of thinking. Tom Delay, for instance, called the EPA the “Gestapo of government … a bunch of jack-booted thugs.”
They won elections in the west and the south by swaggering around extolling the blessed Bill Of Rights and the need to keep the federal government at arms length because Real Men and Women don’t need no Democrat sissy nanny state and her Big Brother taking away their rights.
9/11 changed everything. Suddenly the he-men of WalMart and the NRA leaped into Big Brother’s arms and shrieked “save me, save me! Do what ever you have to do, they’re trying to kill us all!” They now look to Daddy Government not to discipline the children, but to check under the bed for them every night, reassure them that the boogeyman won’t hurt them and then read them a nice bedtime story about spreading freedom and democracy. It turns out that underneath all this swaggering bravado, the Republicans aren’t the Daddy party — they’re the baby party.
This article in the Boston Globe from yesterday (via Maha in this terrific post) gets to what I think is the central problem with this country’s response after 9/11; the alleged super-hawks who were leading this country wet their pants with fear and behaved like frightened children:
In march of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, facing the crisis of the Great Depression, said in his inaugural address that ”the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
The fear people felt then was not nameless, unreasoning, nor unjustified, as Roosevelt well knew. In fact, his address went on to say that ”the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone . . . Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”
What Roosevelt meant was that fear can distort judgment and cloud the mind’s ability to perceive right turns from wrong turns in the road to safety.
[…]
The Bush administration’s predilection to torture was clearly a result of mind-clouding fear caused by the greatest terrorist attack in history on Sept. 11th, 2001. The same can be said of the excesses of the Patriot Act, and, too, the decision to use the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without benefit of warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The Bush administration has shamelessly used fear to get its way. Both the president and vice president have tried to picture a withdrawal from Iraq as resulting in an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq, and an Al Qaeda-led Caliphate stretching across the Muslim world. In reality al Qaeda hasn’t the remotest chance of taking over Iraq, not with 80 percent of the population either Kurdish or Shi’ite, and a timely end to American occupation might sooner lead to an Iraqi-Sunni disenchantment with foreign terrorists.
Of course, the right has traded on fear for so long that we can hardly remember a time when they didn’t. If it isn’t the commies, it’s the hippies or the ATF or the terrorists. And as Kevin points out they make these ridiculous decisions over and over again because they are essentially afraid of their own shadows:
The fact is, superhawks always claim their programs are vital to American security, and they almost always turn out to be wrong. We didn’t need to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, we didn’t need Joe McCarthy’s theatrics during the Cold War, and we didn’t need COINTELPRO during the Vietnam War. And when the Church Committee outlawed the most egregious of our intelligence abuses in the 70s, guess what happened? The Soviet Union disintegrated a decade later. Turns out we didn’t need that stuff after all. America is a lot stronger than its supposed defenders give it credit for.
This idea that we are living in a unique time that calls for special measures is what they always say. (And this current fantasy about the unique threat that proved our oceans couldn’t protect us is particularly rich considering they fearmongered a communist threat of total annihilation for decades.) Often cooler heads are able to quell the worst excesses (like the fervent belief that we needed to launch a tactical nuclear war against the commies) and satisfy the right wing’s other ongoing paranoid fantasy — the left as a fifth column — with silly, wasteful surveillance of animal rights groups or Quakers or former Beatles (along with pernicious surveillance of their partisan opponents.)
They are rhinestone cowboys who are scared to death and don’t know how to contain their fear. So they lash out at their domestic political enemies, who they can bluster about and pretend to be tough, while hiding behind the military uniforms of their Big Brother and Preznit Daddy (which is a real stretch when it comes to Junior.)
The fact that they continue to win elections as being the tough guys perhaps says more about our puerile culture than anything else. They lash out like frightened children and too many people see that as courage or resolve.
Violent Islamic fundamentalism is a serious problem, not an existential threat. And it’s a difficult problem that requires adults who can keep their heads about them when the terrorists put on their scary show, not big-for-their-age eight year olds staging a temper tantrum.