On Patriotism

The big political news story of Thursday, July 3 – the day before the Fourth of July holiday – was this:  

 

Democrat Barack Obama struggled Thursday to explain how his upcoming trip to Iraq might refine, but not basically alter, his promise to quickly remove U.S. combat troops from the war.

 

The “get out now” left, and most of the press, was all over his case. The man who always said this war was a colossal mistake now wants us to stay there? Obama was forced to say, in multiple press briefings, that no – that is not what he said at all. He said he’d look at the facts on the ground and decide the best way to get out – with minimal repercussions. He prefers to have all the facts and think things through, and then decide what’s best.

 

That may be thoughtful, but delusional. There will be massive geopolitical repercussions if we leave, at any time, ever, and geopolitical chaos, followed by worldwide economic chaos, if we stay much longer, given what Iran can do if we, or Israel, try to make things somewhat better by neutralizing Iran with a massive military strike. Leaving is simply out of the question, as is staying, as is escalating. And that doesn’t even address Afghanistan, where things are worse than ever and we now must extend Marine tours there to keep a lid on things, as all our other resources are tied down in Iraq. We said we’d never do such a thing again – our troops cannot go on like this – but we have no choice.

 

The McCain folks were in heaven. Obama had flip-flopped and had no principles, and so on and so forth. You need a president with steely resolve, who, no matter what the cost, never wavers – and look at this guy. He’s getting all thoughtful, now. You get their point. We need someone who says, for example, that he’ll bravely do a swan dive into the pool from the ten-meter platform, and if someone points out someone emptied the poll last night, will not waver, but dive anyway – or something like that. They didn’t use that metaphor. But that seems to be the general idea. You stick to what you said – no matter what changes.

 

Thoughtful conservatives, like Andrew Sullivan, just don’t get it:

 

But facts change. Shouldn’t tactical policy respond? I would never have felt that Obama would be a good president if I felt he’d stick to a position on an issue irrespective of empirical data. As long as the goal is total withdrawal from Iraq as soon as possible, and the man doing it has the vital characteristic of having opposed the war in the first place, I’m fine with pragmatism. Any conservative should be.

 

And this shift is yet another instance of Obama’s remarkably shrewd post-primary strategy. He is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for McCain.

 

If you want to withdraw from Iraq - as prudently as possible - Obama is your man. He won’t risk chaos in a precipitous withdrawal regardless of the strategic and tactical situation. Unlike McCain, he is also unafraid of Baker-Hamilton diplomacy; and unlike McCain, he does not threaten a hundred years of occupation and the suspicion that he’d like the U.S. to stay there forever.

 

What can McCain say now? All he can say, I think, is that Obama is cynical. I don’t think that’s fair: there’s a distinction between cynical and pragmatic.

 

Sullivan goes on to call Obama “a gifted strategist” – not afraid to take questions on about his patriotism, directly, and on race and other matters, and willing to say to everyone, left and right, let’s slow down and think through all this. Sullivan adds this:

 

And if you don’t see the power of it, just check out the Bush-right blogs right now. They’re veering between a splutter and a strange new respect.

 

Being thoughtful and calm can indeed make the other guy look like a fool – unless you like thoughtless patriotic posturing, which some do. See this regarding Eric Estrada – the fading star of the long-forgotten television show CHIPS, the guy with the great teeth, has endorsed McCain. He doesn’t follow policy stuff much at all, but he knows McCain is “a man’s man” – and that’s enough for him. He makes McCain’s other Hollywood supporter, Chuck Norris, seem erudite.

 

But it’s that thoughtless patriotic posturing – steely resolve and a flag pin – that seems to be becoming the issue this time around. But that’s an old story that David Greenberg, in a long two-part article in Slate, examines. The item is Waving the Flag - How the “patriotism” debate might actually help Obama.

 

Greenberg is a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, and has two new books out – Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge – frames this as a history lesson:

 

The 1988 race for the White House was the last campaign of the Cold War. By the time Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and Vice President George H.W. Bush emerged in mid-spring as their parties’ nominees, Mikhail Gorbachev had begun his historic reforms, and the superpowers had signed a landmark arms-reduction deal. Still, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union remained intact, and the Democrats remained afraid of being tarred as squishy-soft. So when the Republicans met in New Orleans in August for their convention, with Dukakis far ahead in the polls, they set out - in the manner of many previous GOP campaigns - to paint their adversary as weak on defense and suspect in his devotion to country.

 

And the devil is in the details:

 

Weeks earlier, the Democrats had decorated their convention stage in soft colors - salmon, eggshell, and powder blue - for more affecting TV visuals. Seizing on this departure from the classic red-white-and-blue décor, the Republican keynote speaker, Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, mocked the Democrats’ “pastel patriotism,” insisting that it meant they would “weaken America.” Bush, for his part, attacked what he called Dukakis’ view of the United States as just “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” He then led the assembled in the Pledge of Allegiance - a pointed contrast to an ancient Greek oath that Dukakis had included in his own nomination speech and an invidious reference to Dukakis’ veto of a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance bill many years before.

 

And, oddly, McCain, in his first term in the Senate spoke too, railing about Dukakis – saying that when he was prisoner of war in Vietnam, he was beaten by his captors for crafting a small American flag – “because he knew how important it was for us to be able to pledge allegiance.” Dukakis didn’t think the pledge should be mandatory. McCain ended with the words “duty, honor, country” – and that brought down the house.

 

And then there was Dukakis himself, as Greenberg notes, with “his swarthy, beetle-browed looks, his ethnic last name, and his Jewish wife.” It was all over. And now, as Greenberg also notes, we have Obama, the “un-American - an exotic foreigner raised partly in Indonesia with a Muslim middle name, married to a woman who said that only her husband’s political achievements have made her ‘proud’ of her country, a cosmopolitan elitist too snooty to wear a flag pin in his lapel or clasp his hand to his breast during the national anthem.”

 

So it should be all over, again, even if Obama explains his patriotism. And McCain has it easy:

 

A decorated veteran, he earns praise from Obama as “a genuine war hero.” Even his determination to see the war in Iraq through to the end comes across as principled - proof that his calls to put country first originate in the heart. (And his attacks on Dukakis give pause to those who would otherwise trust his pledge to run a clean campaign.) Many Republicans have voiced hopes that the issue will save McCain’s foundering campaign -and this week’s ginned-up controversy over Wesley Clark’s perfectly reasonable remarks about McCain suggests they might.

 

The Clark remarks were covered here – but the larger issue is patriotism, or something like it:

 

Never fixed by a single definition, it has always been subject to debate. And presidential contests are referendums about national identity. This year both candidates have just put their names to short essays in Time explaining what love of country means to them. McCain’s described a familiar, traditional patriotism. He stressed military service and other forms of sacrifice to “protect the ideals that gave birth to our country: to stand against injustice and for the rights of all and not just one’s own interests.” Though his essay paid lip service to Americans’ differences, it emphasized “the duties, the loyalties, the inspirations and the habits of mind that bind us together as Americans.”

 

Obama’s essay focused less on responsibilities than on rights. It celebrated “the idea … that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door … that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution.” More than McCain’s, his contribution dwelled on the value of America’s diversity - “We are a nation of strong and varied convictions and beliefs. We argue and debate our differences vigorously and often” -even as he suggested that those differences exist within a context of shared underlying values.

 

So they come from different places. It’s their respective political parties:

 

Since the end of World War II, the conservative version of patriotism that the Republicans have championed has rested upon a steadfast protectiveness of American values in the face of enemies - proven through a muscular, nationalistic military posture. Impatient with critical perspectives, conservative patriotism advocates an unhesitant participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and even public prayer. McCain, who is fluent with words like valor and sacrifice, firmly belongs to this tradition.

 

Postwar liberalism has defined love of country differently. It calls for candidly identifying what’s wrong with America in order to improve it. It tends to regard collective gestures like the Pledge of Allegiance as hollow, tokenistic, and even potentially coercive - and thus antithetical to the individualism that lets free thought flourish. To conservative patriotism’s semper fidelis, liberal patriotism counters with e pluribus unum.

 

The two views may be incompatible, and Greenberg points to Ronald Reagan’s televised farewell from the Oval Office:

 

Reagan was elected in 1980 to vanquish what his predecessor Jimmy Carter had called a “crisis of spirit.” As president, he bolstered the armed forces and talked tough to the Russians - and spoke sentimentally about the flag and the pledge at every opportunity. As he reviewed his two terms in January 1989, the president boasted of having “rebuilt our defenses,” faced down the Soviet Union, and won the peace. Renewed strength, he argued, had led to the “the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism, … one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years.” But Reagan also cautioned his audience that relativism and self-criticism still endangered this revived morale. “Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children,” he fretted, calling for a return to a time when “we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions”—suggesting, in passing, that those two things were the same.

 

Ah – we’re always right, and anyone who says different is a traitor. No ambivalence allowed. The other party didn’t get it:

 

Instead, liberals have typically hearkened to ideas like those of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic standard-bearer of the 1950s and a beau ideal of many on the left.

 

Stevenson assumed leadership of the Democratic Party at a time when patriotism politics had turned ugly. Loyalty oaths were proliferating, as were mandatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance - newly tricked out with the phrase under God, to set America apart from the godless Soviets. Stevenson inspired liberals by bravely defying the culture of conformity. In a speech to the American Legion during the 1952 campaign, he said that “patriotism with us is not the hatred of Russia; it is the love of this republic and of the ideal of liberty of man and mind.” “True patriotism,” he insisted, was “based on tolerance and a large measure of humility,” on respecting dissenting speech in the service of collective improvement.

 

Obama fell into the trap:

 

When Obama declared last fall, using Stevenson’s phrase, that “true patriotism” consists not of wearing lapel pins but rather of “speaking out on issues [including those] that are of importance to our national security,” he joined a long line of Democrats who have echoed the governor’s noble words. (When Bush taunted Dukakis - “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” - Dukakis replied thoughtfully and admirably: “I don’t know what some people see when they look at that flag, but I know what I see. I see a quarter of a billion faces, of all ages and all colors and all shapes and all sizes … for all of our diversity, we are one nation, one people, one community.”)

 

That may have been too subtle. Greenberg sees “Reaganite” patriotism – “military strength and an uncritical celebration of national symbols” – trumping the Stevenson model, with its emphasis on freedom of thought and conscience. Patriots let the state think for them? That seems to be the idea.

 

And you know the history:

 

It’s hard to remember a time when the Republicans didn’t own the patriotism issue. You have to go back to the 1930s and ’40s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt captured the flag on behalf of fighting poverty and defeating fascism, to find the Democrats in command. Back then it was the isolationists - mostly Republicans - who suffered sidewise glances and charges of faithlessness.

 

But the Cold War turned the tables. A nuclear Russia and a Red China fueled charges that the Democrats, despite Harry Truman’s staunch anti-communism, were lax in defending the American Way. The mood grew suspicious. “Un-American” became the feared epithet.

 

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, who owed his presidential candidacy to his battlefield heroics, never stooped to impugning Adlai Stevenson’s patriotism. But he didn’t have to. Richard Nixon, his running mate, derided “Adlai the appeaser … who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment,” while Ike smiled placidly. Stevenson, in his speech to the American Legion, countered that “to strike the freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety.” But the subtlety was all Stevenson’s. Voters chose Ike in a landslide, twice.

 

There’s much more, but Nixon plays a large part in the story:

 

As Vietnam and generational change split the country, younger liberals came to regard flag-waving and pledge-recitation - like military service - as emblems of enforced conformity. Teachers sued school systems to abstain from saying the pledge. Radicals torched Old Glory to protest an unjust war waged in America’s name. Most liberals, to be sure, abjured such gestures. But they defended their countrymen’s right to engage in them - rooting their own patriotism in the right to dissent.

 

When Main Street Americans grew angry at the left’s irreverence, Nixon, returning in 1968, rode the backlash to the White House. In November 1969, he applauded the “Great Silent Majority” of Americans who backed his Vietnam policy; soon after, he gave out flag lapel pins for his staff to wear - the better to needle liberals who found such displays jingoistic. Calls to support the troops and uphold the nation’s honor permeated Republican speeches. “America: Love it or leave it” bumper stickers adorned cars and trucks. Liberals, bridling at Nixon’s exploitation of national symbols, increasingly found it hard to join in acts of old-fashioned patriotism. Simply to speak of love of country could sound divisive.

 

So that’s where the flag pins come from.

 

And Reagan was the master:

 

Reagan soon burnished the patriotism issue to a high gloss. To temper his warmonger image, Reagan had learned to utter treacly words - “I always get a chill up and down my spine when I say that Pledge of Allegiance” - that would have sounded impossibly hokey coming from Nixon. But, like Nixon, he grounded his patriotism in a foreign policy of standing up to communism. Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada to depose a left-wing government provided a perfect occasion to brandish national pride - a mini-Vietnam that ended in victory. At a high-spirited ceremony on the White House South Lawn, replete with fluttering flags and the Marine Corps band, the president welcomed home the medical students who’d been on the island nation, declaring, “What you saw 10 days ago was called patriotism.”

 

You had to be there. It was very odd. And there was the campaign against Modale:

 

The goal wasn’t to demonize former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee, but, as campaign aide Richard Darman wrote, to “paint RR as the personification of all that is right with, or heroized by, America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America’s idealized image of itself - where a vote against Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against a mythic ‘America.’”

 

Are we there again? Yes, but it may not work:

 

… most Americans are now much less worried about terrorism than they were four years ago, and 2008 may turn out like 1992, when economic distress and Bush fatigue neutered the usual patriotism tricks. Unhappiness with the second George Bush and pocketbook woes could also mean that McCain’s vision of patriotism isn’t so much repudiated as admired respectfully from a distance - like a World War II Army kit in the Smithsonian Institution. Obama may reach the White House not because of his view of patriotism but despite it.

 

And Obama may have insulated himself:

 

Although Dukakis got only limited traction from his son-of-immigrants narrative, Obama has leveraged his status as the nation’s first viable black presidential candidate to great advantage. He has effectively equated the national improvement that Stevensonian patriotism has always sought with his own election to the White House. As Obama wrote in Time last week, “this essential American ideal -that our destinies are not written before we are born - has defined my life. And it is the source of my profound love for this country: because with a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine could only happen in America.” Even McCain has taken to calling him “a great American success story.”

 

You see where this is heading:

 

Reagan’s handlers framed the 1984 race so that a vote for Mondale was a vote against a mythic America. Obama’s strategists have put in place a frame in which voting against him means rejecting a vision of an America where a black man can become president. Once a tough sell, this idea is gaining power as the election draws nearer.

 

But just in case, Obama has taken to wearing that tiny American flag. But there’s a sense of irony to it.

 

But this is working. At the far right site RealClearPolitics see Steve Stark:

 

Say what you want about Obama, he’s no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names - whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian - were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story - he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.

 

Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk - including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom became one of his many spiritual mentors and has already damaged Obama’s candidacy all that he’s going to.

 

But the pattern throughout his career indicates that Obama apparently cultivated these gentlemen - and undoubtedly many others - more for what they could do for him and his political career than for what he could do for them. And he has already disassociated himself from both Wright and Ayres, albeit clumsily. Does that make him very ambitious? Yup. But if that were a disqualification, we could eliminate virtually every presidential hopeful in history, including John McCain.

 

That falls under the heading of grudging respect.

 

And John McCain must deal with it –

 

Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything.

 

So it’s NOT flag pins. It’s about what comes first.

 

The liberal Matthew Yglesias worries about that:

 

I’m going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there’s literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries.

 

Actually, back in 1951, in Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster put it nicely in that famous quote – “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

 

But patriotic Republicans would send their own mother to Guantanamo, it seems – and patriotic kids would turn in their parents, as in Stalinist Russia and East Germany. You do the right thing. Some of us find that repellant. But McCain needs to feed his base, so implies such things. This should be interesting.

 

But that “Reagan Patriotism” may be fading. The old fart of the chattering class – or if you will, the Dean of Plotical Journalists – David Broder, at the Washington Post, is having odd second thoughts about Bush:

 

I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office.

 

That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests.

 

But Broder argues we ought not do anything this time, really.

 

Matthew Yglesias comments:

 

And yet here we are in 2008. And I don’t think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon. And Bush, like Nixon, has become unpopular. But Bush won’t be hounded out of office.

 

I’m not exactly sure what accounts for the difference. I wasn’t alive in 1973-74. I have a vague sense that at that time America’s elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn’t just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it’s taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don’t really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can’t see that something’s gone wrong here, but I’m not happy about it.

 

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly adds his thoughts:

 

I agree that the David Broders of the world have been far too sanguine about the abuses of the Bush administration. At the same time, the difference here really is pretty obvious. Nixon broke the law repeatedly for purely political purposes: to help his friends, punish his enemies, and keep tabs on domestic groups he happened to personally dislike. There was no ideological dispute about the value of what Nixon did: once it became clear that he had actually done the stuff he was accused of, liberals and conservatives alike agreed that he had to go.

 

Obviously that’s not the case this time around. So far, anyway, there’s no evidence that George Bush has done anything wrong for purely venal purposes. He approved torture of prisoners and violated FISA because he genuinely thought it was necessary for national security reasons after 9/11 - and unfortunately, lots of people agreed with him at the time and continue to agree with him today. I too wish there were a broader consensus that Bush has acted illegally and ought to be held accountable, but the fact that he hasn’t met Nixon’s fate doesn’t really say all that much about how tolerant we are of executive lawbreaking. Ideological disputes are simply a different kettle of fish than personal vendettas.

 

Later he adds this revision:

 

Matt was writing about torture and FISA, and that’s what I was responding to when I said Bush hadn’t done anything wrong for venal purposes. I only meant to be referring to the lawbreaking surrounding those two issues, not literally everything Bush has done. The US Attorney scandal, among others, quite plainly has a fair amount of venality associated with it.

 

One of Drum’s readers says that, whatever, we now live in a different age:

 

The most important thing is that we still had a semblance of a free and adversarial press in those days. The once great Washington Post essentially told the Nixon administration to go fuck itself with the Watergate stories. Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was a loser while in Vietnam. We had nightly body counts. I remember vividly seeing dead VC and NVA soldiers as well as U.S. wounded on the evening news. And, the NBC Evening News ran part of the street execution of a suspected VC operative by Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, later seen in its entirety in the brilliant Canadian produced film about our Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds…

 

The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and then the Watergate break-in and cover-up added up to as much or more than the crimes of the Bush administration. But, again, the important element missing today is responsible print and television news.

 

And Duncan Black chimes in:

 

It’s difficult to fathom that warrantless wiretapping with no oversight whatsoever is condoned by the leading members of our elite press, and that it’s a dirty fucking hippie position to think otherwise, but that’s where we are.

 

And even the courts see the problem:

 

A federal judge in California has rejected President Bush’s stated view that he is authorized to ignore the law and institute warrantless surveillance of Americans.

 

US District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker confirmed that the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the “exclusive” means for domestic intelligence collection. Walker, chief judge for the Northern District of California, is hearing legal challenges to the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program as well as lawsuits against telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon.

 

The details are in the New York Times:

 

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

 

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

 

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to - and did - establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

 

We should let this go? Maybe, but see Morton Halperin, July 16, 2006, in the Los Angeles Times:

 

The Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of déjà vu.

 

The Nixon administration bugged my home phone – without a warrant – beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.

 

Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon’s “enemies list” – a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.

 

The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, “a scandal would be helpful here”).

 

As I watch the Bush administration these days, it’s hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon’s day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.

 

See Digby at Hullabaloo on this matter:

 

This is why FISA matters. We just don’t know what happened and because of their history, we have every reason to suspect that these powers were used for political purposes under the guise of national security. And with Telcom Immunity, we will have foreclosed the most likely avenue for finding out.(Clearly, the politicians don’t have the political will…)

 

And frankly, the more these politicians insist, for dubious and unpersuasive reasons, that this program must be swept under the rug, the more imperative it seems to me to find out what’s being swept under with it.

 

But true patriots don’t think that way, or so we’re told. The coming campaign will be all about such things.