?If the President broke the law, that?s unacceptable. But I think it?s debatable whether he did,? Vilsack told Des Moines Register editors and reporters.
?And I think Democrats are falling into a very, very large political trap,? he said. ?Democrats are not going to win elections until they can reassure people they are going to keep them safe.?
No. Democrats are not going to start winning elections until we go back to fair elections. Vilsack, governor of Iowa, ought to know better. On election day, 2004, Iowa started building an electoral tsunami for Kerry in the early afternoon, with results starting to approach a 60 percent advantage for the Democrat. And yet, in a stunning reversal, Bush ultimately took Iowa.
Vilsack?s spy comments came at exactly the moment when Republican opposition to the warrantless spying?and other BushCo initiatives?is mounting, a pattern that has been repeated over and over throughout the Bush presidency. The more
resistance to the initiative, the more imperative it is to have a figure with hefty lefty cred come out for it, someone who can raise a thoughtful finger and say, Consider before you automatically condemn our brave commander-in-chief.
The intelligence industry is currently building facilities to mine the information, organize it, and zero in on key words and phrases. Or names. The new operation, centered in Colorado, will be able to store the electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days.
A good gray Democrat, Vilsack lacks?or studiously strives to suppress?the slightest curiosity about the political possibilities of spying on such an unprecedented scale.
Milton Mayer [They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-45, University of Chicago Press] describes how it happened under Hitler:
Hitler got them to a pitch and held them there, screaming at them day in and day out for twelve years. They were uneasy through it all. . . .
Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany?not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted?or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt?and feel?that it was not German Man I had met, but Man. . . .
If I?and my countrymen?ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm. For there is no harm that anyone else can do to a man that he cannot do to himself, no good that he cannot do if he will. And what was said long ago is true: Nations are made not of oak and rock but of men, and, as the men are, so will the nations be.
Mayer, a Jew, says of the ten Nazis he profiles, ?I liked them. I couldn?t help it.? They weren?t at all monstrous. They were just small?that?s how they referred to themselves, as ?little men.? The Unitary Executive is talking to the very same little man when he sternly warns the nation that the ?plotters and planners? haven?t gone away, and probably never will.
It makes my skin crawl to watch Bush spin bogus stories about preventing an attack on the ?Liberty? (actually Library) Tower in Los Angeles, wondering if the trick will work again. Kristol is right about paranoid liberals. I am starting to have truly lurid suspicions about what BushCo have done, and what they?re capable of.
Strangely enough, it?s only the left that prohibits any account of conspiracy in the ordinary workings of the world, even though it is the left that lost an entire generation of visionary activists to political assassination in the sixties.
Coretta Scott King?s death last week was an uncontrollable whiff of 1968, the smell of cities on fire from coast to coast: both Martin and Bobby. Spying and political assassination; wiretapping and cold-blooded murder: could there conceivably be a connection? Unlike Jackie O, who merely whisked her children away from the good ole USA to Greece and the protection of an international business magnate with more money than God, Mrs. King said publicly that she and her family did not believe James Earl Ray killed her husband. Imagine.
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