Has there ever been a political movement more antithetical to the political values they pompously espouse than the right-wing movement -- those "small government" Authoritarians -- epitomized by National Review Editors?-- Glenn Greenwald

Probably. But these ninnyhammers deserve your daily eviscerations.

Hello Glenn,

I would very much appreciate it if you could answer an important question for me: are there any precedents for the U.S. Congress granting immunity from prosecution? It seems that such a measure fundamentally violates the separation of powers, but (of course) that doesn't mean it hasn't been done or tried before.

Thanks,

Isaac Speer

UCLA Graduate Student

The guys who killed 12 million civilians in concentration camps and rained down mechanized destruction on hundreds of thousands of civilians in London and Stalingrad were not terrorists? They were less lethal, and more honorable and civilized, than the Islamofascists who killed 3,000 Americans one day six years ago?

Fuck me. Just fuck me, shoot me, bury me. That's it. I quit.

It used to be that conservatives promoted the image set out in the Star Spangled Banner, that America was "the land of the free and home of the brave." Now they have re-written the lyric, excluding "the land of the free" as too pre-9/11, and updating the post-9/11 portion to read "the home of the terrified." Yes, we are to be so scared of the Terrorists, whose threat is greater than naziism, that we simply must ditch the national anthem as it has been. We are to surrender our freedoms eagerly, and swing between cringing in fear and lashing out at anyone and everyone in blind fury.

Showing these folks that what they say today is inconsistent with what they said yesterday is about as effective as showing a dog a photo of the couch he chewed up last week.

The constant around which the right wing fixes policy is not philosophy. What unites past and present wingnuts is pants-pissing fear. They were afraid of the commies (thought they now see the Reds through rose-tinted goggles), they feared the Clenis, and now they fear Islamic Liberal Fascism.

Oh, and for 40 years they have been terrified of the DFHs. Can't forget the hippies.

...and quite possibly long after: Do you have any idea where I can get that bumper sticker? It puts into 8 words much of what you've been saying.

It is arguable that 4th ammendment restrictions pertain only to criminal investigations, where the target of searches/eavesdropping are known in advance, at least in part. However the purpose of the types of eavesdropping we are talking about here are quite different. The purpose is to discover insidious terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and whose participants are completely unknown. Thus one can not tell in advance whether the targets are citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, illegal aliens or aliens living abroad. It is unreasonable to apply restrictive interpretations of the 4th ammendment in these cases.

John Dean said it best: Modern conservatism stands for absolutely nothing, except maybe knee-jerk opposition to liberalism.

...the National Review appreciates that they'll be under surveillance as well as the rest of us.

...they even understand what they're advocating and where it will inevitably lead.

...if these idiots realize they've already lost the argument and the country.

The USA is no longer the land of the free, home of the brave. I have fallen on the side of the defeatists. When I read:

It is irrational to give non-Americans within our borders probable-cause protection: The Fourth Amendment does not require it, and experience shows that most foreign terrorists who infiltrate the U.S. are either illegal aliens or temporary legal immigrants.

I am left in disbelief. I cannot even imagine the rationalizations happening in the head of these people.

And the "opposition party" ain't doin' a damn thing about it.

-Derek Java

It is arguable that 4th ammendment restrictions pertain only to criminal investigations, where the target of searches/eavesdropping are known in advance, at least in part. However the purpose of the types of eavesdropping we are talking about here are quite different. The purpose is to discover insidious terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and whose participants are completely unknown. Thus one can not tell in advance whether the targets are citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, illegal aliens or aliens living abroad. It is unreasonable to apply restrictive interpretations of the 4th ammendment in these cases.

That's a really great argument except for 2 small things --

(1) The Fourth Amendment applies to all "searches and seizures," and has nothing to do with the distinction you're inventing; and,

(2) The Supreme Court already ruled 8-0 in 1972 that the Fourth Amendment was violated by the warrantless eavesdropping which the Nixon administration was conducting and claiming was necessary in order to find domestic terrorists -- i.e. Nixon used your argument and it was rejected.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=407&invol=297

They didn't know who the Terrorists were. They were searching for them. And the Supreme Court said - unanimously - that warrants were still required under the Fourth Amendment.

Other than that, your argument is really good.

Just stick to "The Terrorists Are Scarier Than Everyone Else Before" -- at least it's coherent.

The National Review is Osama bin Laden's wet dream. That they so fear him and his ilk they are willing, nay EAGER, to abandon core American principles (AND bankrupt us-- a twofer) must be so gratifying for him.

I just read a beautiful poem by Barbara Crooker -

Euonymus Atlas.

Outside my window, the bushes have turned, redder than any fire, and the sky is the same blue Giotto used for Mary's robes. My mother says, if she still had a house, she'd plant one or two of these kind of bushes, and I love how she's still thinking about gardening, as if she were in the middle of the story, even though we both know, she's at the end, the last few pages (deceased, in my case).

Down at the meadow the golden rod's gone from cadmium yellow to a feather beige, the ghost of itself. Mother, too, fades away, skin thinned as the tissue stuffed up her sleeve. The scars on her stomach itch and burn, but inside, she's still the girl who loved to do cartwheels, the women whose best days were on fairways and putting greens (not my Mother, but that's okay). She knit scarfs for warmth.

On television we'd watch California go up in smoke, flames leapfrogging ridge to ridge.

Here, these leaves release a shower of scarlet feathers, as everything starts to let go.

How this world burns and burns us,

yet we are not consumed. By Barbara Crocker (apologies for a couple of liberties, I took).