comes around...
Good times all around. It never fails to amaze me that people don't understand putting additional power into an institution, failing to properly oversee it by placing limitations on its mission and authority to carry out a task, and allowing it to persist long after its intended purpose has been served, doesn't work out the way that we all were told it would.
As I usually intone, whatever party actually limits the power and scope of government's ability to invade our individual rights is the one I'll support. I won't support parties that pay lip service to such things, ala the GOP, only so long as they're not in power (and while they busy themselves oppressing various social freedoms for no apparent reason in addition to this higher crime of oppressing general individual liberty, this merely pushes things over the edge into total hypocrisy).
Obviously one should fail to surprised that this vast expansion of power hasn't immediately dissipated with the expulsion of the Bush administration. I had some hopes merely because Obama was something like a Constitutional scholar that we'd have some provisions that again protect the privacy and primacy of individual rights. But considering much of his legal advisers are being held up by the Senate confirmation hearing process, I guess that rebelling against these silly notions will take time.
During which, of course, I could be labeled as a dangerous and subversive radical (not that I mind). More to the point, all those people who went around with the calling card of "if you've got nothing to hide...", will suddenly discover they do have something to hide. Funny for me. I get to get in a few "I told you so"s. Giving such power of censorship or a sort of broad data mining of subversion in the futile attempt to control a few thousand potentially violent anarchists is pointless in the face of a few random nutcases who could show up at any point at a church or school armed to the teeth. Such witch hunts tend to only demonstrate the ability of power to corrupt as it will sooner or later turn its ugly gaze into places that it has no business being in.
Yo-Yo Ma Performs Bach in Alaska for Earth Day
43 minutes ago
Posts
2 comments:
And this out just before the Tea Party! WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! Can't every one see it was all a setup!?!?!?
Talk about sore losers. Hell, Bush stole the presidency and no one whined this much on the other side. And where was all this worry about our debt when he shot it up higher than Reagan did, a feat rather difficult to do, but apparently getting easier as time moves on?
It was almost as if everything was perfect the last eight years and now pandemonium has erupted. I need to accelerate my savings.
There was whining on the part of Gore backers, or just generally frustrated people with Bush (particularly during the post-9-11 days when it often seemed shrill and pointless to the vast majority of Americans), but it wasn't getting as much of an official leadership. Michael Moore? Compared to Faux? Hardly.
I think the most common reminder of why stuff like this is a bad idea is that priest from during the Nazi days in Germany. He says he liked this version:
"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
That's the danger you get yourself into. For some reason it's generally used by protest movements, but nobody "important" seems to have thought it through (and wiki calls it a call against apathy, when it reads more like a call against statism). "They" deserve everything they're getting as a result.
Post a Comment