Better Safe...AND Sorry?

Cue continued outrage from left and right on American phone and internet transactions being spook monitored. This hoo-ha is disingenuous and decades late. The mice that are Americans long ago gave it up.

As a baby boomer, I was wee when Sen. Joseph McCarthy terrified my parents' generation. He ran the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as inspiring similar lunacy at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Subversive Activities Control Board, and even linked to the Hollywood (really all entertainment industry) blacklisting. He couldn't have destroyed so many lives, lied so many lies and instituted the mechanisms without lots of help, such as Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actor's Guild, and a McCarthy's good buddy and fellow Senator Richard Nixon.

Art note: The period Soviet poster exhorts young builders of communism to educate and convert.

Until 9/11, the craziness of that era seemed far away and unreproducible. Lists of covert communists insinuated in the State Department? Actors living to subvert us with their performances? Professors converting innocent students to Soviet control? Clear crap, we might have thought...until recently.

Now our irrational nation fear is not of Russians nor their contemporary Yellow Peril as the WWII generation dubbed the rising Chinese. Rather, terrorists in the form of the various al-Qaeda incarnations, the Taliban, and any person or group who kill Americans, particularly in the United States are, well, terrorizing us.

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Granny Says

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Maybe your grandmother used the folksy, "Better safe than sorry," as mine did. That was an analog of the Boy Scouts' "Be prepared." Sure, there irrefutable simple-mindedness there, but little else.

I eventually learned that such verbal tics are merely I-told-you-so placeholders. It's like hearing either, "It's only commonsense," or "Let's not reinvent the wheel." The message behind those wheezes is, "I have nothing, not reasoning or proof. I'm about to make bald assertions that I don't want challenged."

Back in the post-WWII Red-Scare times and now again in post-9/11, those with little or no regard for this nation's famous, hard-won, clearly defined freedoms do their worst. Yes, it was McCarthy, Nixon and Reagan before and after their presidencies, the Bushes both spook and the lesser, and now President Obama.

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Time to Reverse

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There is cause for outrage, for extreme wariness, for remedies.

Again, as a boomer, I grew up with the idea and ideals that we were exceptional as a nation. It wasn't the unjustifiable manifest-destiny thing. Rather, from  the Colonial era, through our revolution, into our states' and federal constitution and its add-ons, we set the world tone for liberty. We guaranteed a free press, free church, and even forbade the English occupation evils such as no-due-process for searches, trials or punishments.

Wow, we goofed up big time again and for the past 12 years in particular.

We've sent uncharged vaguely defined enemies off for torture and almost certainly did the same here. We run a concentration camp in Cuba where hundreds of uncharged suspects despair. We allow civilian-on-civilian gun murder on the skimpiest of excuses of feeling our lives or even property just might be somehow, someway threatened.

Now again we find that covertly and with or without Fourth Amendment safeguards, our very words and movements are captured, stored and analyzed. The oppressive policies we decry in China, Indonesia and elsewhere seem to too many to be OK here, as in better safe than sorry.

The pathetic corollary to such unjustifiable intrusion is a pattern of individual brutality. In the Red-Scare era, people (as in Americans) were denied their livelihoods, accused of and brought to trial for treason, hounded from their homes and professions, and beaten down even into suicide.

Let's forget the slippery-slope argument. Instead, this should be binary. What if one of more security agencies or some level of cop decide your internet activities or phone calls "prove" you are a terrorist or otherwise threat to the nation or one its politicians? Our legal system's background aside, that seems more like Gitmo than innocent until proven guilty.

If it's, "See right here. This known terrorist's number called yours four times." Ta da!

Sorry, guys. This reeks and cannot stand.

For once, I have to agree with the squawking class. We've backslid during stressful times, but as a nation, we've given up too much and worked too hard for freedoms unimaginable in the rest of the world. We can't join them in cowed acceptance in the name of better safe than sorry.

Tell your President. Tell your members of Congress.

Milhous or Millstone?

Let us lefty types praise Congressional Republicans, at last for their current stupidity. That is, their reanimation of the odious GOP disgrace Tricky Dick Nixon.

They seem to be oblivious to the low comedy nature of the likes of "I know you are, but what am I." When the Pee-wee Herman character responded that way to an insult, it was more evidence of his puerile foolishness. Now Congressional GOP type and their not so foxy media touts chant an unending Greek chorus of "Nixonian."

The knowledgeable and analytic know first that the evils of the lawless, ruthless Nixon are not at all like the events Obama haters are failing to turn into scandals. Moreover, winger media as well as Republicans push and push the comparisons with Nixon, first the same as and then even worse than Nixon.

I accept as so many pundit types of all political stripes have said or written, that Republicans won't rest, vindicated until they force a Democratic President from office. Nixon, of course, slithered away ahead of impeachment, indictment and jail and under a pardon from his replacement.

Alas, the unrelenting efforts to drive Bill Clinton from office surely were driven by the Nixon stain. The GOP did get him impeached for lying about and inducing others to lie about his being fellated by an intern. He did not leave office and if anything his personal and political stock climbed. (It's worth noting that several of those leading that impeachment effort were at the time involved in long-term adulterous relationships, and lying about those.)

Regardless, this full chorus singing for Obama's impeachment serves two purposes:

1. Highlighting governmental problems, while even in the short term having hearings that show the President to be innocent of the allegations.
2. Reminding all voters that Republicans have decades of nefarious association with the sleaziest of all Presidents. 

Yes, the GOP loves to claim being the Party of Lincoln. Really though, they have revivified that awful zombie to make us aware they are the Party of Nixon.

Younger voters who had only a vague historical reference to Nixon are learning more and more about his sordid administration. They now know that this is the Republican way. The GOP would have been far wiser to leave hid corpse undisturbed.

Boomers and older voters hear this dreadful belch from the past. We too re-associate Republicans with the sneaky, lawbreaking, Constitution abusing Nixon.

When Watergate became his Waterloo, Nixon tried to defend his criminal leadership and simultaneously shift the focus from this abuse of office to whether he had profited financially from his misdeeds. Among his remarks at the time were, "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."

Well, he seemed incapable of honesty, but truth be told, he was a crook, on many levels.

So, thanks GOP'ers. You have successfully and repeatedly reminded us how the Party of Nixon acts and speaks.