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You are here: Home / Politics / FISA Update

FISA Update

by John Cole|  October 9, 20071:03 pm| 20 Comments

This post is in: Politics, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Democratic Stupidity

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Glenzilla previews the next episode of WATCH THE DEMOCRATS FOLD.

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Previous Post: « When Rhetoric Meets Reality
Next Post: The Distinction Is Clear »

Reader Interactions

20Comments

  1. 1.

    Dreggas

    October 9, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    I seriously plan on voting for Cthulu next election. I mean really, why settle for the lesser evil when we can just get pure unadulterated destruction underway already?

  2. 2.

    Punchy

    October 9, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    JC, we all know what you think of FDL, but The Hyphenated One is a courty-type person (lawyer? para?) and is all for this.

    In fact, lots of progressives are overjoyed with this. It gives Bush some stuff, but also forces the WH to hand over all the docs and a bunch of other accountability stuff.

    They are basically attempting to trade Kurt Warner in exchange for Tom Brady and praying the WH is still living in 1999…

  3. 3.

    John Cole

    October 9, 2007 at 1:28 pm

    I am not sure why everyone thinks I hate FDL. I don’t.

    Hamsher pisses me off when she goes insane periodically, but I don’t have any particular animus towards her. I really don’t. Maybe I did in the past, but I don’t know now, and I don’t remember really hating them as people. I did dislike some of the things they did.

    If there was anyone who blogs on the left who I had a knee-jerk response to, it was Atrios, and that feeling has subsided lately.

  4. 4.

    The Other Steve

    October 9, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    Isn’t his name Glenwald, or something like that?

    I need to get my Protein Wisdom secret decoder ring out.

  5. 5.

    Zifnab

    October 9, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    WATCH THE DEMOCRATS FOLD.

    Faster than Superman on laundry day.

  6. 6.

    Pb

    October 9, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    If there was anyone who blogs on the left who I had a knee-jerk response to, it was

    Juan Cole?

  7. 7.

    The Other Steve

    October 9, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    If there was anyone who blogs on the left who I had a knee-jerk response to, it was Atrios, and that feeling has subsided lately.

    Oh man, he’s center-left. Don’t you have any real left bloggers to piss you off? No Kucinich fans?

  8. 8.

    Zifnab

    October 9, 2007 at 1:47 pm

    In fact, lots of progressives are overjoyed with this. It gives Bush some stuff, but also forces the WH to hand over all the docs and a bunch of other accountability stuff.

    Yeah, I saw this bit. Not sure what the purpose of getting a bunch of incriminating evidence on the President and his cronies is if you just plan to make everything he did retroactively legal anyway.

    Kinda like forcing Nixon to turn over the tapes right after you’ve made breaking and entering by administrative officials perfectly ok.

  9. 9.

    Tim F.

    October 9, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    Oh man, he’s center-left.

    No, he’s a dick. Neither John nor I care that much what specific stand someone takes as long as they take it with some degree of class.

  10. 10.

    Dreggas

    October 9, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Tim F. Says:
    No, he’s a dick. Neither John nor I care that much what specific stand someone takes as long as they take it with some degree of class.

    I read him, and sometimes (being somewhat of a prick myself) find his prickishness satisfying but I agree, there are times when I would just as soon call him a dick as listen to what he has to say.

  11. 11.

    Gus

    October 9, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    One can be both a dick an center-left. Also the commenting community there is pretty insular. I like them, but Christ you guys, get some friends in the real world.

  12. 12.

    Billy K

    October 9, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    If there was anyone who blogs on the left who I had a knee-jerk response to, it was Atrios, and that feeling has subsided lately.

    That really warms my heart. Atrios is my favorite blogger. (After Tim F., of course)

  13. 13.

    Mr. Moderate

    October 9, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    Ugh…big government Republicans and big government Democrats are hardly distinct when they think they will soon have full control of the keys to the kingdom…

  14. 14.

    Billy K

    October 9, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    One can be both a dick an center-left. Also the commenting community there is pretty insular

    No kidding. I’ve read Atrios every day for years now, and I still have no idea what’s going on in the comments.

  15. 15.

    KCinDC

    October 9, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    I don’t think Atrios’s commenters have much to do with his blog. How many comments even mention the post? Isn’t that Haloscan window essentially just a free-floating chat room?

    Certainly Atrios may be a dick, but I’d’ve thought there’d be a better example than his being mean to Jeff Goldstein. Surely on the list of bloggers who deserve ridicule Goldstein is not that far from the top.

  16. 16.

    The Other Steve

    October 9, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    No, he’s a dick. Neither John nor I care that much what specific stand someone takes as long as they take it with some degree of class.

    That’s hardly a substantial critique. Jeff Goldstein begs for the attention. So Duncan gives it to him in the end. What’s the problem?

  17. 17.

    Elvis Elvisberg

    October 9, 2007 at 3:21 pm

    Calling Jeff Goldstein an “even bigger idiot” is not worthy of an eyebrow raise, much less a conferring of Official Dick Status.

  18. 18.

    Bruce Moomaw

    October 9, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    What’s really interesting about the Dems’ apparent shivering terror that the voters will turn on them for ever favoring essential liberties over temporary security (to quote Ben Franklin) is that the polls themselves show quite the opposite. Consider Rasmussen’s Sept. 12 poll, which showed citizens agreeing by a teensy 64-16 margin that “that a search warrant should be required before the government can ask Internet providers to turn over customer records”. The Dems are not only cowards on civil-liberty issues; they’re STRATEGICALLY STUPID cowards into the bargain. Properly handled, this could easily be not just a harmless issue but a WINNING issue for them.

  19. 19.

    Bob In Pacifica

    October 9, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    This is what Jim Garrison said in his Playboy interview in 1967. Someone point out where he was wrong:

    I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau. I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I’ve always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I’m concerned about all of this because it isn’t a German phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man. What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions, and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same. I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I”ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

  20. 20.

    Adams

    October 10, 2007 at 12:49 am

    Tim,

    Class? You want class? In the face of what Bob in Pacifica quoted above?

    Atrios is an unrepentant DFH who happens to have been right about, uh, everything that has happened in the past five years. I won’t bore you with a list. He is brazenly cynical and appropriately profane about the leadership of both parties, and about the MSM punditocracy. They seldom disappoint the lowest possible expectations.

    If you want to be among the precious VSP villagers who venerate moderation and civility above a vociferous outrage directed at the people who are destroying our country and attempting to rule the world, be my guest. Enjoy that fine, after-dinner Conac while congratulating yourselves on your superior breeding and manners. And do go fuck yourself, too.

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