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Not a coincidence that nobody's harshing on you, Tyler. Real leftists, who totally agree with your point about the loss of privacy rights, had little love for Clinton for many reasons -- remember all those Nader voters? Remember Tom Tomorrow's little waffle icon (which preceded Trudeau's)? Clinton was never a creature of the left, to whom he was always a mealy-mouthed corporatist sell-out.
What they didn't get (until far too late) is that merely keeping the burgeoning neocon/Xtianist/corporate cabal at bay was a huge and triumphant accomplishment, and probably the very best that could have been expected. The knives were out for the Clintons from before the inauguration, and the Repukes -- and the media (and the corporations that own both) -- were never gonna let even mild centrism, let alone anything further left, hold sway too long.
I had friends in the 80s who voted for Reagan specifically because they believed that only if things got much worse would the country's voters remember to appreciate that it was the left that created the policies and programs that fostered the huge growth of the economy and specifically the middle class throughout the 20th century. I thought they were nuts; turns out they were just prescient and a bit premature.
It's to our everlasting shame that it took the horrific and manifold failures of the Bushists to get Americans to start looking behind the curtains again. It's also a sad indictment of our culture, and our educational system in particular, that 35-40% of the populaace still buys the insanity and the lies.
