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Once upon a time, America had a strong president who
reassured the American people that they had nothing to fear but fear
itself. Now we have a weak president who tells us that we
must be fearful of all things all the time. He uses fear as a political
pump to inflate his own ego and power. He even color-codes fear for us,
always keeping the colors flame-hot. This summer, he used the scorching
rhetoric of fear to cow congressional Democrats, scaring them into
rubber-stamping a blatant subversion of our constitutional liberties. Fanning the fears of terrorist attacks, Bush
stampeded Democrats to rush through a law letting the White House eavesdrop
on your and my phone calls and e-mails without bothering to get search
warrants. This new warrantless-spying law gives the U.S. Attorney General carte blanche to order that
any of our international calls or electronic messages be monitored if he
decides on his own that we might be communicating with someone who might be
outside the U.S. who might or might not have even vague connections to some
terrorist group. Yes, this means that our precious privacy is in the
grasping hands of Alberto “See No Evil” Gonzales. He can click
into entire telecommunications networks to intercept millions of innocent
messages without having to show probable cause of illegal activity. Congress ceded this extraordinary reach to the
executive even though there’s already a special court in place to
authorize surveillance of legitimate terrorist suspects — and to do
it constitutionally. Bush’s law is not about protecting Americans
from terrorists, but about protecting the Bush-Cheney regime from the
Constitution. It’s arrogant nonsense for the Bushites to
assert that they’re above the law — but it’s shameful
cowardice for the scaredy-cat Democratic leadership to go along with it.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2007.
