Archives for 2009

The same thing about which John warned the Malkin fringe again and again, illustrated this time by Glenn.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature.

A rightwing “patriot” blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 Americans. Another rightwing activist committed a series of bombings that killed two people and injured at least 150 others. A heavy FOX News consumer shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville for reasons that he plainly described as politically eliminationist. Last week a white supremacist shot three police officers in cold blood after posting a string of online commentary that echoed hysterical rightwing radio rants almost word-for-word. The shooter admitted that he would have killed more if he could.

Here is a suggestion if Michelle still needs shoulder to cry on. Go find a cop. There’s no need to come to southwestern PA; I saw squad cars from Michigan, Massachusetts and Canada at Thursday’s funeral. Tell him or her how completely unfair it feels to have the government keeping an eye on paranoid gun fetishists. She can explain to her new friend how the government was never meant to use unrestrained police powers on her kind of American.

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At least now I can stop wondering whether rightwing torture-and-wiretap freaks ever understood that putting ‘Islamic’ or ‘terrorist’ in the title of a law is not a great way to limit its scope to people they consider Islamic terrorists. If the meaningful part of a law has no penalty for using supposed ‘antiterrorist’ powers on anyone that a law enforcement agency damn well pleases then that is what it will do.

Republicans were not just trying to grease laws with titles that nobody would want to vote against. They really believed that a law’s title and its preamble, if the author even bothered, had some totemic power to protect conservative ultrapatriots from the vile treatment that they wanted to impose on others. Evil, yes, in the obvious pleasure they took in seeing mostly innocent prisoners tortured. But definitely also stupid.

Watching Malkin, the other Boleyn girl, squirm now after she smugly cheered the disappearance of Catherine of Aragon Jose Padilla only a few years ago does not exactly feel good. But it sure isn’t wrong.

***Update***

What TBogg said.

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