The Left’s Conditional Love of Society

VDH asks “whither the shredding?”

If you are a civil libertarian, if you are in the ACLU or a law professor, or a liberal in good standing who swore that George Bush from Texas, with strut and twang and mangled vocabulary, destroyed your liberties with FISA, with the Patriot Act, and with Iraq, then please extend that outrage to Barack Obama, for whom all such shredding of the Constitution suddenly has become merely complex and problematic rather than fascistic. Please list, cite, name just one instance from 2002-8 in which you lost your freedom, or you were censored on the library internet, or you were followed around by the FBI, or your letter to the editor earned a wiretap, or even one instance of the loss of any freedom under Bush—and if so, just one example of how the election of Obama has once again restored your lost liberty. Nothing in the abstract, please—something concrete, an example both real and personal.

Did you notice how the Constitution suddenly just unshredded itself? That wiretapping is just A1-OK and that no-one is unhinged, stamping their little feet, and holding their breath? Could have something to do with fantasies of being able to wiretap republicans… all in the interest of “social justice” of course.

In a major August 2008 decision released yesterday in redacted form, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the FISA appellate panel, affirmed the government's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. The case was not made public before yesterday, and its details remain classified.

Somewhere along the way we “un-apocalypsed”. How and why did that change so quickly?

For all the political hysteria and media dishonesty about George W. Bush "spying on Americans," this fight was never about anything other than staging an ideological raid on the President's war powers. Barack Obama ought to be thankful that the FISA court has knocked the bottom out of this gambit, just in time for him to take office.