by Damozel | The report of the Department of Homeland Security has spawned much grinding and gnashing of teeth among the bloviators of the far right, and especially Michelle Malkin. And who can blame them? No anti-government crazy from the far right has ever, ever committed any violent or terrorist act such as blowing up a federal courthouse and killing 300 people or gunning down people in a little Tennessee church....at least not since last weekend. Nor have any far right nutjobs ever planned to kill a 102 young African-American high school students to express their distaste for an African-American president. As we all know, only Mooslims ever become terrorists.
No wonder the Malkin's ever-frangible feeeeeeeeeelings are hurt.
TBogg:
Ahem.... warrantless wiretaps bitches...
Needless to say, this profiling of pasty-white Where's-My-Fucking-Rapture LoserAmericans has offended some who might be mistaken for one of, you know, them. (TBogg)
Funnily enough, I actually agree with the right wing yappers on one point: as Greenwald acknowledges, "the DHS description of these groups seems excessively broad with the potential for mischief." No true liberal or progressive is going to be down with that.
But there is a rich, rich irony in the demented reaction of the yapping curs of the far right at having their favorite diversions classed as "extremist" right alongside those of the rabid Rottweilers. Turns out -- in the words of TBogg -- that "[i]t’s all fun and games until they start looking at the white man."
J. Thomas Duffy says:
That ear-splitting screeching you heard through most of the day was that of the Flying Monkeys, of the Right Wing Freak Show, flinging their own feces around, aghast at the prospects that the Obama Administration's Department of Homeland Security is (or has already started) looking into Right Wing Extremists,
the prospects of the raising of violence, you know, from all those
calls for revolution, and stockpiling of weapons due to Obama coming in
and taking them all away.
And,
as I read through a bevy of posts, particularly those that question,
why would, say, an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, conservative get their
panties in a bunch, automatically associating themselves with gun-toting, bomb-making freaks?...
Yes, indeed. "Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps," Greenwald says wryly.
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....
Indeed, thanks to the very people who are today petulantly complaining about politically-motivated federal police actions (now that they imagine it's directed at them rather than at people they dislike), the Federal Government today has the power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and read the emails of American citizens without warrants; monitor bank records without court approval; obtain all sorts of invasive personal records, medical and financial, without Subpoenas; and obtain and store a whole host of other personal information about American citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong.
Also thanks to them (and things like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act, etc. etc), most of this is carried out without any real oversight or safeguards, left entirely to the judgment and good faith of federal officials to wield these powers carefully and for proper ends. And, better still, federal officials can hide behind sweeping claims of secrecy and National Security to prevent courts from scrutinizing what they did and determine if it was illegal (we call that "the state secrets privilege").
So what's the problem? As the National Review/Bush-following-Right has been telling us for years now, there's nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.
The first duty of the Government is to protect us all -- keep us safe and warm from all the scary things out there, like a Good Daddy does -- and if they need to trample on some lofty privacy ideals and so-called civil liberties concerns and supposed Constitutional safeguards, well: that's just how it is. It takes a real paranoid hysteric to think that federal government officials have nothing better to do than target domestic political opponents. And besides, what good is the Constitution if we're all dead at the hands of domestic McVeigh-like Terrorists? After all, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact. Remember all of that? I certainly do.
This is all as laughable as it is predictable. Just a couple months out of power and they have suddenly re-discovered their fear of the Federal Government and their belief in the need to limit its powers. (Salon)Besides! As I was saying at the start, it's not as if there is no cause whatsoever for concern or that the McVeigh-like terrorists are a figment of the left's imagination. Tim F. at Balloon Juice, pondering the spectacle, says:
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....
Hell, maybe we can get some of that prior legislation reversed as Christ knows most lefties wish -- and never mind what the administration thinks about it.
Meanwhile, the yappers are out in force, yip yip yipping away. I could link to some of their howlings and frothings, but I got more real value out of just reading the shorters published at Sadly, No! and I think you will too.
Shorter Atlas Shrugs
Shorter RedState
Shorter Ed Morissey
Shorter Stop the ACLU, Hinderaker, & The Jawa Report
But I'm going to give conservative Andrew Sullivan the last word because he's kind of earned it.
But, hey. No hard feelings. Glad to have you back on the side of liberty.
One small question, though: Where the fuck have you been these past seven years?
Memeorandum has more wailing and gnashing of teeth...
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