1115.org

A.P.:

Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush’s domestic wiretapping program Wednesday, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status.

Under pressure from the Bush administration for quick action, the full Senate could take up the measure next week.
[…]
Republicans defeated several Democratic amendments, including measures to insert a one-year expiration date into the bill and require the National Security Agency to report more often to Congress on the standards for its domestic surveillance program.

It’s not true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And of all the things that sensible Americans should fear today, I have to put the government of George W. Bush slightly above al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda, after one heinous attack, seems to have retired from the business of attacking America. The only attacks Osama bin Laden has launched on us in the last five years have been by videotape. (Okay, audiotape too.)* This may be partly because our government has done such a great job of using al-Qaeda to keep us permanently in a high-pitched state of terror. As long as the Bush regime does Osama’s job for him, Osama doesn’t need to do much more than remind us from time to time that he’s still alive and kicking, and al-Qaeda has its tentacles everywhere.

So, at least until we have regime change in the U.S., and we are able to install a government with a more rational, more honest approach to the problem of terrorism, al-Qaeda would seem to be more of a potential threat, and not very imminent either.

Whereas the Bush administration is an actual, ongoing threat to the American people. It is hard at work every day, surreptitiously (and not so surreptitiously) battering down our civil liberties, eating away at our two hundred year old system of checks and balances like a cancer, trampling the constitution and then crapping on it for good measure, usurping more and more power, pushing us ever closer to becoming a police state where either you are sheeple or you are an enemy of the people. (And let’s not kid ourselves that we know the half of it yet.)

It has (proudly) used the tools of despotic regimes through the ages—spying on its own citizens, torturing its enemies, lying to its citizens, casually repudiating universal conventions of human rights and the laws of war. It is well on their way to achieving what anyone would have considered impossible six years ago—the reincarnation of McCarthyism. Thanks to this administration – as Keith Olbermann suggested in his rightly famous smackdown of Dick Cheney on August 30, and as I’ve been saying for a little longer than that – fascism is not just a history-book term any more for young Americans. America does indeed confront a grave fascist threat, from within.

Americans — no matter who they are, no matter how rich or how poor, or where they live or where they work, or whether they work, or what the nature of their work — face a simple choice. Either you can oppose this fascist threat, and by opposing, hope to end it (yes, that was a hat tip to old W.S.’s whether ‘tis nobler in the mind…). Or you can, explicitly or implicitly, become part of the threat. Keeping silent is just tacit acquiescence. According to the polls, a large majority of Americans disapprove wholeheartedly of the fascist turn of events in this country, and are determined to signal their opposition to this threat.

Somehow, the majority of Republicans in Congress – sadly out of touch with their constituents, sadly out of touch with what they (presumably) once proudly espoused as their values – are determined to see lending a willing shoulder to the fascist wagon as an honorable act of loyalty. In doing so, they dishonor the meaning of both those words, honorable and loyalty. They dishonor the whole concept of public service. Their loyalty should be not to the party, not to the dictator-in-president’s-clothing, but to their constituents, to the constitution. I don’t know what is sadder—that we have Senators and Congressmen who need to be reminded of that, or that even reminding them isn’t going to make a damn difference to their behavior. They are so deeply in thrall to the political machine that at this point they can only helplessly watch themselves goose-step along, just lemmings in jackboots.

In my book, the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee stands guilty of this most contemptible form of appeasement. All the more contemptible because they are the ones we charged to protect us from such threats, they are the repositories of the public trust. And I use the word appeasement not because everyone is trotting it out since Donald Rumsfeld put it in play, I use it because it actually fits perfectly. Republicans defended voting to approve the domestic-wiretap-approval bill by this charming argument:

But Republicans countered that the bill represented the best deal on the matter and should not be amended.

Wasn’t that precisely the argument Neville Chamberlain made about Hitler? That the Munich agreement represented the best possible deal for Britain?

How come we don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we don’t negotiate with evil countries like North Korea or Iran, but the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee cheerfully negotiate away our basic civil liberties to the evil regime of our very own Dear Leader, with the justification that we have to give him a foot or so, otherwise he’ll just grab a yard?

Sen. Arlen Specter is selling the White House “supported” bill that he has lent his name to as “a way to have judicial review” of the warrantless wiretapping program. Except that the bill does not mandate such a review. President Bush has agreed (does anyone have it in writing?) to submit the program to a secret review by the FISA court, if Congress passes the bill exactly as ghost-written, without amendments. But anyone who believes that what we think the President is promising and what he will later claim to have promised are one and the same shouldn’t be wandering around Capitol Hill unsupervised, let alone casting votes on the Senate floor.

One thing I would dearly love to know from Sen. Specter. If he supports “his” bill pretty much only because it offers a shot at judicial review, then will he vote against the bill if any amendment is passed?

* I am often much more serious than I may appear to be. For example, here’s Media Matters discussing Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine:

Suskind noted how the Madrid train bombing in March 2004 “was further affirmation of what CIA analysts had first begun to see in sigint [signals intelligence] and limited humint [human intelligence] as far back as the spring of 2002: a possible strategic shift by al Qaeda away from further attacks on the U.S. mainland.”

Funny, isn’t it, how Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Negroponte somehow totally forget to tell anyone about this intelligence? You are laughing, right?