Paranoia’s of the left and right!
For those who may not have been listening for the last day or so, it has been revealed through one of those famous leaks to the press that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been data mining on a large scale the communications of various kinds of many Americans for the last six to eight years. Chief among these operations are the collection of information on millions of phone calls made through some of the biggest phone companies in the nation. Although no claim has been made that there was any actual listening in on conversations themselves, information has been collected about dates, times, locations, and other pertinent peripheral data. In addition to that, all sorts of other information has been gathered from internet sources such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple among others. Indeed, this very piece may have already landed in the NSA’s files. The White House has responded that this program is essential for the safety of the American public in the fight against terrorism.
There has, for several decades now, been legal wiretapping going on through the secret court ordered gathering of information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) act. Wiretapping dates back to the days of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover who was reputed to have bugged the bedroom of Martin Luther King Jr. in an effort to try to understand and to undermine what the black leader and others were doing back during the 1950’s and on through the sixties and beyond. Hoover, who was a voyeur and a snoop as much as anything else was on the minds of the Kennedy administration up until the very day that John Kennedy died. Watergate changed everything, however, and some of the laws and protections enacted due to that fiasco have supposedly changed the way that Americans can protect their privacy. Another huge change occurred as a result of the September eleventh attacks and things such as the Patriot Act have had sweeping implications as regards the privacy of the average American citizen.
One might wonder what the NSA’s snooping and the neoconservative rights fetish over the rights to keep and bear arms might have to do with one another, but there is a definite connection between the two items. The gun bearing right has, for decades, made an issue out of the second amendment and their right to unfettered access to practically any armament that they so desire to own. They have justified this argument by constantly stating that the government is coming to take away their guns and that they will have to pry them out of their cold, dead hands in order to do so. The left is constantly harping about their rights to privacy against an intrusive government and any infringement of those rights rings dear to the average liberals heart. This right to privacy is part of a constellation of causes to which the average liberal subscribes. What is so interesting about the correlation between the right to privacy and the right to keep and bear arms is the fact that both parties are concerned about what the government is going to do about either one. The liberals who espouse big government want that to stop at the shore where their privacy begins while the conservatives who espouse small government want to make sure that it is small enough not to take their weapons away but not small enough to avoid sponsoring a robust military who might have the capacity to take those weapons from them anyway. It seems to make no different to the right that they have three hundred weapons in private hands for every one in the military and police forces possession. It makes no difference to the left that things like the Boston bombings right in the heart of their liberal bastion might have been prevented by better eavesdropping procedures.
The one common denominator present here is government!
It is a paradox really that the right defends eavesdropping while the left would like it curtailed to the point that another attack even worse than September eleventh might cause actions by the government that would even further curtail their rights.
Barack Obama came into the presidency promising a new age of transparency and has ended up adopting and continuing many of the policies put in place by his predecessor George W. Bush. On one of the morning talk shows this week, they had put together an amalgamation of the two presidents to come up with George W. Obama. They were clever enough at it that it was hard to tell the two men apart in the composite picture. This sort of caricature does not end the differences between the two men which are very large indeed. This writer feels much more comfortable with Barack Obama in charge of our national security structure than he ever did with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in charge. Just because the Obama administration has decided to keep in place much of what the Bush administration began in the wake of September eleventh, does not excuse the Bush people from some of the many excesses that they put this government and the American people through in his eight years in office. The left’s insistence on cancelling some of these surveillance programs brought out a response on one of the talk shows that will stay with us for a very long time when one commentator stated that what would anyone say if the Obama administration had cancelled one of these programs and then seen the nuclear bombing of one of our major cities because of the lack of its presence that would have prevented the event from occurring.
It is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation!
We are, after all the dust settles, still playing a high stakes game and there is one thing that is very certain and should be very obvious to both left and right. And that is the simple fact that no matter whether one believes in large or small government, it is the only institution that can protect us from those that would do us harm. The forces arrayed against us have a single minded determination to hurt us in the greatest way that they know how and September eleventh, 2001 was merely the watershed in their efforts to do so. Their determination is to secure a nuclear weapon and set it off in one of America’s great cities and there are forces out there who are more than willing to help them do so. We have to be right 100% of the time while they only have to be right once. It is a heavy burden to bear and the stakes could not be any higher than what they are. If one does not believe that just look at Boston on April fifteenth. It is a frightening thing indeed.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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