Tigerr wrote:

Nothing to do with "left" or "right"

Being against telecom amnesty has nothing to do with being "left" or "right". That's just how it's politically sold, and in this case, these "labels" really are meaningless.

It has everything to do with realising what's at stake; how many rights this bill violates, and what the dangers are of just following the leader's orders.

Unfortunately, this is a complete non-sequiter. The right has never cared about violating people's rights if they are the wrong sort of people. See the Dred Scott decision. Or Plessy v. Ferguson. See the Alien and Sedition Acts. Or the Civil War. Or Joe McCarthy.

Here's what Robert Altemeyer wrote in his online book, The Authoritarians:

Here’s another one of my measures, which I call “Posse,” that you may find so ridiculous that you’d say no one would ever buy into it. Humor me, gentle reader.

Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults.

Please respond to the following statements according to the following scale:

-4 indicates the statement is extremely untrue of you.

-3 indicates the statement is very untrue of you.

etc. to:

+4 indicates the statement is extremely true of you.

1. I would tell my friends and neighbors it was a good law.

2. I would tell the police about any religious cults I knew.

3. If asked by the police, I would help hunt down and arrest members of religious cults.

4. I would participate in attacks on religious cult meeting places if organized by the proper authorities.

5. I would support the use of physical force to make cult members reveal the identity of other cult members.

6. I would support the execution of religious cult leaders if he government insisted it was necessary to protect the country.

I’ll assume, because I know what a fine person you are, that you would respond to each of these statements with a -4 or a -3. Most people do. But not authoritarian followers. They typically answer with -2s and -1s, and sometimes even say, “Yes I would.” If that shocks you, remember that the premise behind “Posse” runs right down Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, “Go get ‘em,” the high RWAs saddle up.

Who can ‘em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults, “radicals” and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.

Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.” (I told the subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains: “If the government says these people are dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped.”

Yup! Rightwing authoritarians are so committed to violating people's rights that they will even violate their own.

Of course it's a matter of left and right.

There are exceptions, to be sure. In a nation of 300 million, there are millions of exceptions. But the statistical great mass reflects this skew in values. Just look at the social conservatives' embrace of Rudy Guiliani.

Seriously.

Our country is so far gone, in so many sectors that nothing short of a Nuremberg-style reckoning is going to be sufficient to return us to a state of functioning normally--whatever that means. I am reminded of Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerloff's interview in Der Spiegel back in 2003,

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0729-06.htm

when he said:

The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.

The utter irresponsbility he pointed to was quite clear, given that budgets are all about numbers. And the same irresponsibility runs throughout everything the Bush Administration does. Only now the Democrats have joined together with him in the spirit of bipartisan lawlessness, in an attempt to utterly destroy our republic.

Like I said, this is why God invented the Nuremberg Trials. Because nothing less will do.