Don't let the fear-mongering work again.

Glenn Greenwald calls bullshit on the GOP and their media enablers who claim "terrible things will befall us -- scary, "unthinkable," "severe," "dangerous" things -- unless we all harmoniously comply with the President's demands for the power to spy on our communications without warrants and without oversight, and unless we immunize telecoms that broke the law." He implores the Dems to do the right thing and not cave in yet again.

There's one reason and one reason only why the Protect America Act expired last February and why the orders obtained under it are set to expire in August. It's because the President and Congressional Republicans blocked an extension of the PAA because the President said he would veto any FISA amendment unless telecom amnesty was attached to it (Lichtblau notes: "Democrats have offered temporary extensions in the surveillance law, but the White House has resisted that idea").

[...]

That is the hallmark of the Democratic Party leadership: they are afraid of looking weak, and the way they try to solve that problem is by being guided by their fears and allowing themselves to be bullied into complying with the President's instructions. They actually still think that being bullied and always being afraid to take a stand will make them look strong. They have yet to figure out that it is that craven behavior which makes them look weak, and appropriately so, since it is weak.

But even that ostensible political fear makes no sense whatsoever. Democrats control the agenda in Congress. They determine what bills are voted on. All they have to do is force a House and Senate vote on a bill that does two simple things: (a) exempt foreign-to-foreign calls from FISA's warrant requirements and (b) extend the PAA surveillance orders by 6 or 9 months. When the GOP filibusters that bill, or when George Bush vetoes it, then that will obviously preclude the GOP from using the expiration of those PAA orders as a club to beat Democrats, since it will be as clear as day -- so clear that even our national press corps can understand it -- that it was the President and the GOP, not Congressional Democrats, which caused those orders to expire.

Whatever else happens, the excuse that will be offered by Democrats -- that they were pressured and forced into accepting this "compromise" because they would be politically harmed if the PAA orders expired in August -- is patently false. They could easily obviate that weapon by simply offering a bill to extend the orders. When they don't do that, and instead agree to a "compromise" that gives the President virtually everything he has been demanding, it will not be because they were coerced or pressured into doing so, but rather, because they, too, favor warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty.

Identity Politics

I had a epiphany years ago when a friend of mine was expounding on the enormity of the Holocaust and I felt I had to ask him to clarify that: "it's the fact that so many people were exterminated that made it so awful, right, not the fact that they were predominately Jews? i.e. it would have been just as horrible if the victims had been some other group?"

More recently, in conversation with another friend who was actively and passionately involved (with me and many others) in a particular political issue, I made the point that I was in complete agreement with him on this issue because it was yet another example of corruption: decisions being made to benefit a few friends of those whose responsibility and obligation it was to do what was best for the whole group. He seemed stunned at first because (it seemed to me), this was his big issue, perhaps his only political issue and therefore (at least implicitly) more important than other (people's) issues.

I was not trying to take anything away from this issue but, rather, I was trying to make the point that it was one of many examples of a more general issue. I hate injustice, not just injustice that negatively affects me and mine. I am in support of resistance to all injustice but, as anyone who has scarce resources to allocate, I have to make choices. The fact that I focus on some issues or causes more than others doesn't mean that I think the others are less valid. But it's easy for people to lose sight of this truth in the heat of the moment. On this topic, Barbara O’Brien at the Mahablog makes a really good point about what she calls "identity politics".

The Wiki definition of “identity politics” is “political action to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or neurological wiring).” That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a critical aspect of IP that this definition leaves out. And that is the tendency of IP activists to care and work passionately only on behalf of the marginalized group with which they share identity (hence the name, “identity politics”).

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the end result is a balkanization of advocacy groups that compete with each other for donations and attention and sometimes even work against each other. And that end result is one of the reasons the Right has been able to dominate American political discourse for the past quarter century or so.

[...]

As I wrote a couple of days ago, equality by definition has no preferences.

I intensely dislike “identity politics.”

Identity politics are not about “fighting for one’s equality.” They are ultimately about celebrating inequality and responding to divisiveness with more divisiveness. They are about attaching one’s ego and self-identity to a partisan group and favoring that group at the expense of other groups.

“Fighting for equality” is fighting for equality. Equality by definition has no preferences. If you are fighting for equality only for your particular slice of the demographic pie, then you aren’t fighting for equality but for favoritism.

Complicit Enablers, indeed!

You really should read regularly the incomparably and consistently excellent Glenn Greenwald. His signature principled and articulate outrage is directed at the hypocritical "complicit enablers" in the media who greeted with silence the Senate report documenting BushCo's lying the country into starting a war. These people, who swooned and howled when Clinton lied about a blow job, are unblinkingly "calm and quiet" when confronted with evidence that the administration is made of up war criminals.

Greenwald:

No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.

The only news made by that Senate report is that, in our country, a report like this -- documenting that the Government lied us into a war -- is no longer news at all. Extraordinary conduct of that type has been converted by the David Broders of the world into commonplace "policy disputes." As a result, our press corps -- which literally spent hours and hours on the air Thursday night pitifully staking out Hillary Clinton's house and breathlessly reporting on the movement of every SUV and have spent days (with no end in sight) sharing with each other their moronic fantasies about what Clinton and Obama might have said to one another -- have ignored almost completely the issuance of that Senate report, as well as the fact that John McCain now says he embraces the extremist theories of presidential power that have led to the panoply of these abuses.

It's not difficult to understand why our media stars are so dismissive of the crimes committed by the Bush administration. It's because, with very few exceptions, they've endorsed and defended those crimes.

[...]

The same stars of the Liberal Media who paralyzed the country for two years with their fixation on Bill Clinton's sex scandal -- and who relentlessly insisted that he be forced from office -- have spent the last seven years calmly telling us that there is no reason to get all excited or upset by what the administration has been doing. As the administration repeatedly broke multiple laws and degraded every last realm of our political culture, most of our Broder-led media class remained nice and "calm and quiet." Of course they don't believe there should be any consequences for the crimes that have been committed by this administration because, as complicit enablers in all of it, those crimes are also their own.

These people are war criminals and need to brought to justice and their media enablers need to be thoroughly discredited as journalists. Otherwise, it will just keep happening. As Digby wrote yesterday:

This is another edition of "when you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again." In this case, it's literally true. The worst decision Bill Clinton ever made was letting Iran-Contra slide in the name of healing and "getting things done." He got impeached for his trouble and these people came back and perpetrated the Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory.

The SSCI waited until nearly the end of Bush's term to bring this up in order that it be relegated to the "healing" file and nobody ever pays the price. It's how the establishment protects itself. (See: Libby, Scooter.) Maybe somebody thinks we can just wait for Michael Ledeen to die. But there is a whole new generation weaned on conservative movement tactics and they will keep the zombie alive until they get their next chance unless it's stopped once and for all.