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The Lawless Surveillance State
The latest revelations of illegal domestic spying highlight what has become increasingly clear about the nature of our government.
Glenn Greenwald [2007-12-16]

  • I told them so

    And most strikingly of all, the political movement that spent decades telling Americans that they stood for limited government and the rule of law and against federal incursions into our lives -- the right-wing "conservative" movement -- has boisterously cheered on every one of these lawless expansions of the surveillance state, all because, for now, they are at its helm.

    This is why I'm an unapologetic leftist. This "conservative movement" is the same cowardly faction in American politics that plotted with Hitler against FDR and America for the "inevitable defeat" of the U.S. that fortunately never came and made war on their own citizens who hinted they might see some value in the ideals of democratic socialism, hounding many of them into oblivion with false accusations of plotting with Stalin when they plainly had not. Fortunately for us the ACLU has yet to succumb, not for lack of trying. You will find this "quote" at various right wing sites. It reeks of Bircherite conspiracism:

    "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." -- Norman Thomas, Socialist Party Presidential Candidate in 1940, 1944 and 1948, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

    I can't tell you who originsally said it, only that it certainly wasn't Norman Thomas.

    http://radicalreference.info/node/1160

    I can tell you that Reagan was fond of quoting it as the exact words of Norman Thomas.

    I have always had the same reaction to the right as the aphasics Andrew Weill wrote about in, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, as they watched Reagan speak on TV.

    That skill was suspected for a long time, but the new study is the first to prove it. In the book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist-author Oliver Sacks describes a group of aphasics watching Ronald Reagan speaking on television and laughing at what they perceived as deceptive statements by him.

    http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/05.18/aphasic.html

    Fortunately I was dropped on my head one too many times as a child.

    -- L.W.M.
    [Read L.W.M.'s other letters]
    Sunday, December 16, 2007 04:34 AM
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