Vanity Fair Poll Shows Most Americans Remain Brainwashed Idiots

"America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat"- blogger writing on SmirkingChimp last July

"It is a fact that every democracy that's existed  has committed suicide." - John Adams


The recent Vanity Fair poll results on ethics, disclosed this morning on CBS Early Show, is enough to drive the true citizen into permanent depression. In one poll question, to do with Edward Snowden's ethics in disclosing NSA surveillance overreach, 54 percent asserted he was in the wrong, only 27 percent that he was right to do so. Meanwhile, even more atrocious, nearly one fifth of respondents (19%) said they "had never heard of Edward Snowden". That means a total of 54% + 19% = 73% of those polled are either dolts or brainwashed morons. That's essentially three-fourths of all Americans, assuming this sample is in any way representative, which I believe (from past polls) it is.

The VF hack who released the results on the air said it showed "Americans' opinions had evolved from when they first thought he was a hero."

No, that's not it at all. It shows these fools have been brainwashed by the steady,  anti-Snowden media portrayals and drumbeat! And the people were too damned dumb to see through it, and how their minds were being manipulated. Worse, a fifth of the morons were so detached from their responsibilities as citizens - to protect their 4th amendment rights - they didn't even know who Snowden was.  It boggles the rational mind to comprehend how a people who once valued liberty and had enough education to see through vapid media PR, now can't tell their asses from holes in the ground

Sickening! Do the people of this nation even deserve their civil liberties? I doubt it.

If we take common sense for granted in this sampled population (and that is not a foregone conclusion by any means) then one would expect people who are reasonably educated to be aware that their privacy rights are bound up intimately with their 4th amendment rights - to be free of lawless search and seizure. As I noted in previous blogs to do with this issue, while the specific right to privacy isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution,  the Founders understood that as time went on new rights would emerge which they might not be able to think of (e.g. to health care), hence bundled these into the unenumerated rights under the 9th amendment..

We also expect them to be informed enough to grasp the extent of NSA's unconstitutional mass data collection. And hence to realize that if NSA can snatch their email address books, Google searches and content, web browsing histories, Twitter messages, and cell phone calls as well as all telephone call logs, they are in the condition described by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who described the NSA programs to the Guardian thusly:

"The Snowden revelations have made clear that there has been an intrusion on our right to privacy of unprecedented scope, yet the government is dismissing any complaints about our right to privacy as irrelevant."

Roth said: "I used to be a prosecutor – I used to put pen registers on people's phones, collecting the numbers that you dial – but I had to manually compile the numbers. It was very labor intensive, and hence self-limiting. Today, the computer can piece together your entire personal life in a matter of seconds."

These damned "Americans" who polled against Snowden make me want to puke. I also know they'd make my Revolutionary War ancestor Conrad Brumbaugh puke, and believe he'd wasted his blood fighting for independence and liberty. Why do it for a bunch of ninnies, sissies and parasites who'd give their freedom away for a song, just to feel "safe"?  They are a waste of space and remind me of the "good Germans" who looked the other way as their friends and neighbors were trotted into camps for criticizing Hitler, the Third Reich or harboring Jews. Those "good Germans", after WWII. had to be dragged into the concentration camps to be shown first hand what their passive compliance engendered during Hitler's reign.

So really, Americans ought to be getting on their damned knees and THANKING Snowden for revealing what he has about the disgusting trampling of their 4th amendment rights.

Sadly, this farce shows how easily people in this country can be led by the nose, and I warrant it's mainly because they don't read enough. They don't read history, don't read economics or politics, or even the news. They certainly don't go to the next level in separating what's sold them via PR, from facts. No, it's easier to stay mired in the vapid, solipsistic virtual "friend" world of Facebook, or Twitter.

They remind me of the same buffoons and passive nincompoops who willingly allowed their polling to be gamed and "moved" via media propaganda back in 2003 - ultimately allowing Bush Jr. to launch the Iraq War, and our congress critters to meekly agree (so terrified were they of the polling).

These "Americans" are a disgrace, and don't warrant the appellation of citizen!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/57357/the-fourth-branch-the-rise-to-power-of-the-national-security-state

Snowden Gets His Say And the Traitors, Weasels and Neolib Cowards Go Nuts

WHO are you gonna believe? A patriot defending your 4th amendment rights like Ed Snowden, or a weasel and cowardly 4th amendment traitor like 'Lurch' Kerry?

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

Last night, Edward Snowden finally had his say on network American TV ('Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden', NBC) in a prime time interview by Brian Williams. Even before the interview aired, Williams - on NBC Nightly News - in previewing the interview, noted many viewers had written the network expressing their disgust and they may never watch it again. They also labeled him a "traitor".

My reaction? These are mock Americans who don’t  deserve liberty. These are what I call sheeple as opposed to free-thinking people. (Brian Williams at the end of his interview said:  "Many Americans are upset at Snowden because they can no longer sleep soundly at night" - on account of terrorists now getting the better of us.  Awwww....boo hoo hoo, poor little babies! Give 'em a sippy cup and a change of diapers!) They’ve meekly followed and imbibed the propaganda spewed by the corpora-media and the security state which is the real culprit in terms of trashing the 4th amendment. As Snowden pointed out to Williams,  in a real democracy we ought not be tolerating any "security state" - the two are mutually exclusive. So again, as Ben Franklin posed it - do we want liberty or security?

Anyway, it's the whining,  infantilized wusses who’ve followed the lead of the American puppet media by making Snowden and his travails, asylum seeking and persecution the story instead of the vile overreach he disclosed – which as others have pointed out – leads the way to tyranny (especially via the COG program).


What does that make these mock Americans? In my book it makes them “Good Germans”. Go back to the end of World War II and the American occupation of Germany in the years after 1945. We assailed the “weak” German people and mocked them for not standing up to the growing metastasis of Hitler’s Reich which they obviously saw but did nothing about. These vermin actually praised the Gestapo and helped rat out their neighbors to them, usually for speaking against Hitler or hiding Jews.

Who would have believed 80 years later, a coterie of weak-blooded, meek, pseudo-patriot,  pussified "Americans" (and I use that term very loosely - hence the scare quotes) would emulate the Gestapo-loving Germans of the 1930s? But there it is!

Then there was the weasel, coward and 4th amendment traitor John Kerry, mouthing off on the same news segment and bellowing about the "damage" Snowden caused (he likely meant more the embarrassment at being caught out) and calling him a "coward and traitor".  Imagine Kerry's nerve calling Snowden a "coward" when he essentially burned all his bridges to leave a comfortable life behind to alert too many underserving 'Muricans what was being done in their name.

Meanwhile, the real coward is Kerry, who in the 2004 Presidential election ran with his tail between his legs - instead of standing and fighting - when the 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' unloaded on him.  Then, after the violations of voting rights were disclosed in Ohio (including suppressing minority voters by limiting polling places and making many use "provisional" ballots), this weasel never followed up and demanded a full -on investigation. He just punked out like the punk he is.

Kerry is also a hypocrite and 4th amendment traitor. Recall back in March Lurch's boffo performance in actually claiming:

"It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.

Kerry clearly displayed  NO historical memory at all.  In a blog post at the time I had to give this delusional chump a hint about this nation's  "willful choice to invade another country" and using a "completely trumped up pretext" as in "WMD" to do a shock and awe in Iraq. A "war" and invasion which was illegal from the get go.

But Kerry's treachery, as well as that of most of congress, inheres in changing the law (the 1978 FISA law) originally there to protect us from overweening surveillance, following the exposure of illegal wiretapping by Bush. The latter was then rendered "legal" via a revised FISA law,  effectively  gutting the 4th amendment and paving the way for dragnet NSA surveillance.  As Robert Scheer noted in a June 25, 2013 blog post on smirkingchimp.com, ‘The Good Germans in Government’:


"Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation”

How important is that individual conscience in terms of ethics? At the Nuremberg War Crimes trials we informed the Nazis it trumped all else, even government regulations, laws and orders! The operating Principle (VI) came to be known as the Nuremberg Code and clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name.

Moreover, Snowden has since been vindicated. Judge Richard Leon, in a 68 -page ruling issued in Washington December 17, 2013, vindicated Snowden by arguing that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the U.S. constitution,  Judge Leon also declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data.

This remark alone shows Snowden is not the villain the Neolib traitors make him out to be but a fuckin' HERO!  Now, add to that - if that wasn't enough -  the issuance of  a  300-page report  by a commission appointed by Obama himself - not any screwball, terror loving commie symps. The report made 46 recommendations including that the NSA be stripped of its power to collect phone records in bulk.  In addition, the panel advised that the NSA be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet- themes pounded by tech companies when they met with Obama last December. (Which makes a mockery of what one talking head "national security" specialist said on CBS' Early Show this morning, i.e. Snowden "hurting tech companies" - when he in fact revealed how the NSA had done so, by unraveling their security systems!)

Even Jim Sensenbrenner, who helped write the Patriot Act, declared that the intent of the law was never to allow the NSA the latitude of mass surveillance that Snowden revealed.  I was also delighted to see Colorado Senator Mark Udall, a leading critic of the NSA overreach who said - in his own words:

"The  (Leon) ruling underscores what I have argued for years: [that] the bulk collection of Americans' phone records conflicts with Americans' privacy rights under the US constitution and has failed to make us safer,"

The problem with the NSA and its troglodytes is they think that because they have the techno tools to spy into every nook and cranny of the world, they are mandated to do it, 'cause otherwise them 'thar terrorists win! Which is utter horse pockey.  You can't use the terrorist bogeyman as an all encompassing excuse to rob people of their rights.

Besides which, the odds of any such attack are slim and none.   Gideon Rachman in a Financial Times piece two years ago, i.e.
observed that the number of Americans killed by terrorists since 1960 is "about the same as the number killed over the same period in deer accidents".

 He also  showed "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack".  By way of comparison, the chance of dying in an airline crash is one in 346,000 and the chance of being annihilated by a large asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) in its collision with Earth, is the same, according to Sir Martin Rees ('Our Final Hour'). 

So why have so many of our compatriots mindlessly branded him a traitor? Because those forlorn consumers have lost track of their rights as well as obligations as citizens, and basically surrendered them to the state. They may also be deliriously ignorant of the warp and woof of the rights inherent in the Fourth Amendment - and we know that polls taken after 9/11 disclose 3 of 5 Americans couldn't name three of the Bill of Rights. The 4th amendment is VERY clear that specific warrants must be issued, not mass warrants! I don't give a fuck how "inconvenient" it is or how long and arduous that process might be. Tough shit! Either adhere to the principles or admit you're traitors to your constitutional oaths. People can read the words of the Fourth for themselves below:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Read it slowly and carefully, especially the emphasized portions over again. Clearly, the NSA MASS-grabbing of data embodied in PRISM, 'Boundless Informant', XKeyscore, etc.  directly violate the 4th amendment, and yeah, I'm as much a stickler about the 4th as the gun people are about the 2nd.

Am I a civil liberties “extremist”? Damned right if that means a citizen who understands that the Constitution is not just “a piece of paper” (as Bush once called it) and that the rights inherent in the Bill of Rights are real, apply to individuals, and not mere “compromise abstractions” but rather hold the key to American identity – what truly sets us apart. And once those rights are gone, believe me they won’t be coming back! Once they are gone we will cease to be the nation my ancestor,  Conrad Brumbaugh,  envisaged and fought for in the Revolutionary War as one of the Pennsylvania Regiment.

We all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude and those who say otherwise have no business calling themselves patriots or Americans. They belong to the same class of vermin as Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering, and the other Nazi scum who used (via the Gestapo) their own extensive methods to grab up power more than 70 years ago.

As for 'Lurch' Kerry, he isn't even fit to lick the bottom of Snowden's shoes. Kerry, a Neolib punk who wouldn't even stand up for himself against a torrent of abuse in an election - doesn't  belong in the same room with a real patriot and hero.  The fact Kerry could brand Snowden a "fugitive" and demand he "man up" (to turn himself in and face Kangaroo court justice) shows how little he grasps of the core issues at stake here. But if this fool, tool and hypocrite couldn't even grasp that the U.S. violated international law when it illegally invaded Iraq (while branding Russia the bad guy for occupying Crimea) then we see what a poseur he is. It's Neoliberal weasels like John Kerry who will spell the end of this Republic, not red-blooded American heroes like Edward Snowden!

-----------
Footnote: The NSA claims it's only been able to recover "one email" of Snowden's to the effect he made any effort to bring his concerns to the attention of higher ups. Now, if anyone really believes that this is all the spooks could really turn up, well, I have some prime beach front property in Barbados to sell you for a song!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/alfredo-lopez/56122/usa-freedom-act-has-nothing-to-do-with-freedom-phone-surveillance-reform-bill-passed-by-the-house-is-

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/watch_highlights_from_edward_snowdens_interview_with_brian_williams/

Can We Prevent Another Holocaust From Happening?

                                                                                          


Photo taken outside the Mauthausen Concentration Camp by Russian soldiers in May, 1945.

"Evil takes place when human bonds are broken, when concrete relationships crumble for the sake of abstract identifications. When we divide the world into sheep and goats, into good and evil, the 'sheep' - the self-proclaimed good- have a tendency to subject the goats to the worst imaginable treatment. In doing so, the sheep's group identity is made stronger, something that forms the basis of new and better identification of 'goats'."  - Lars Sevendsen, 'A Philosophy of Evil'


Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, it behooves all of us to consider what if anything can be done to prevent an abomination like the Holocaust from ever occurring again. Lars Svendsen's book is a good place to start, because it shows the potential for idealistic evil occurs within us all. Idealistic evil is that form which emerges when people stop thinking of others as human like themselves and instead put them into abstract brackets. The Nazis did it when they relegated the Jews in Europe to pests, e.g. rats, even making films to depict them that way. The Hutus in Rwanda did it to the Tutsis - of which they slaughtered over 800,000 -- by comparing them to "cockroaches." Despite the fact no outside observer could ever find the slightest difference between members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribe, the 'sheep' in this case (the Hutus),  did bracket their opposition as predatory 'takers' and traitors. Unleashing a genocide was merely the next step.

In his trenchant book, Svendsen examines  the doings of Rudolph  Höss  (commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp), Adolf Eichmann and Lt. William Calley - comparing why they did the horrific things they did and noting in each case the common denominator was a failure to be conscious of their deeds or their significance- hence to take any responsibility for them.

For example, Höss, an SS-Obersturmbannführer,  in his autobiography - said he was not to blame and he was merely "following orders". Besides, he insisted, he did not actually herd the Jews into the gas chambers or throw in the Zyklon B gas crystals. He had effectively detached himself from the evil he spawned. Adolf Eichmann in his trial, after being captured by Israeli agents, made similar claims and offered that he was merely a mid-level bureaucrat  - again just following orders- assembling names of Jews into documents for transport. How could he be to blame?

Ditto with Lt. William Calley, who while he didn't participate in a holocaust on the scale of the extermination of the Jews, did participate in a mindless massacre of innocents. As Svendsen observes (p. 177):

"Take another famous example,  namely the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968. Lieutenant William L. Calley was commanding officer, and therefore was principally responsible for the massacre which lasted around an hour and a half.  In that time, 507 innocent people were murdered- among them 173 children and 76 infants. Calley alone killed 102 people. The official report read: '128 enemy resisters killed in battle'. For one thing it wasn't 128 killed but 507. For another they weren't 'killed in battle' but slaughtered while helpless. They weren't  'enemy resisters' in the sense of soldiers but ordinary civilians."

 The scene at My Lai, Vietnam after William L. Calley and his troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians.

As Svendsen goes on to note (ibid.):

"In his own mind, Calley was simply following orders and doing what was expected of a good soldier. He couldn't believe his ears when he was accused of mass murder."


In other words, Calley was exactly like Adolf Eichmann in the sense that his "orders" trumped any charge he could have done anything wrong. Thoughts of what he was doing when he ordered the massacre of unarmed villagers went out the window as they did with Eichmann as he assembled 1,000 or 1 million more names for his transports to the gas chambers. Or  Rudolph Höss when he ordered his S.S. commandos to herd 1,000 more Jews into the gas chambers at Birkenau ("Auschwitz 2" the actual  death camp) . As in the case of Eichmann and Calley, Höss' orders from the 3rd Reich High Command trumped any need for him to really THINK of what the hell he was doing.  In each case, whether for Eichmann, Calley or Höss, conscious thought was the first casualty as the killers or killing masterminds were turned into automatons.

Svendsen's point is that none of these evils would have occurred, firstly, had the Jews not been reduced to vermin, and the Vietnamese not been reduced to "gooks". Because each group had been abstractly de-humanized they became 'goats' and hence fodder for extermination, whether in the mass form of the Nazi gas chambers, or in Calley's form of troops slaughtering an imaginary enemy (but real innocents) with their M16s.  As Svendsen noted, "they have said it was wrong to kill but they were in a war."

So war made it all right not to think about what you were doing, whether pulling a gas chamber lever or emptying your clip into a 6 month old  "enemy" infant.

The saddest element, as Svendsen adds, was the respective populations of the nations themselves were largely ignorant or in denial of the heinous deeds. The "good Germans" protested that THEY weren't the ones that committed the crimes, and they didn't know where the death camps were. Also, how could you expect them to help hide the Jews when the Gestapo had its eyes and ears all over?

In the case of Calley's supporters, Svendsen writes (p. 179):

"When Calley was condemned, the White House received 100,000 letters in one day alone, supporting William Calley.  'The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant William Calley'  sold a million copies in a week.  TIME conducted an extensive survey in 1970 where two thirds of Americans said they were not emotionally moved by the massacre, while eighty percent said it was wrong to indict him."


This itself is enough to make a sentient person vomit, including the fact not one of Calley's men saw that they'd done anything amiss. Again, "just following my orders". That one's own countrymen could be so desensitized to the evil committed (and in their country's name) as to be emotionally unaffected and to go so far as to support the perpetrator boggles the mind! But of course if those bodies were merely regarded as "gooks' you could understand why so many in the polls wouldn't give a damn. Hell, it wasn't THEIR kids or wives - say slaughtered by the Chinese. Besides they'd been brainwashed to believe ALL the "gooks" were the enemy (Viet Cong.) 

Svendsen's clear point is that so long as other people, other groups, mean nothing to us - in terms of putting them in abstract categories to hate - we will give no thought to their elimination. When we become unthinking supporters of idealistic evil, we become just as bad as those who perpetrated the evil, whether Rudolph Höss as he had 1.8 million gassed at Auschwitz, or Lt William Calley, as his band of warriors slaughtered 507 innocents at My Lai. 

So long as specious popular support remains for these types of criminal mass murderers and their actions the potential for future holocausts exists.  It means, or implies, a blind spot to moral failure and evil exists within us all which can be charged at any time, say if the right fanatic gets into power and manages to pull the right cords. What Svendsen argues for - and I do as well - is that we must move beyond the nature of being mere puppets or automatons to become conscious of our acts and with whom we align. We also have to applaud those (like Snowden) who refused to follow orders, given that it is exactly the "order"  template that has repeatedly spawned the worst atrocities in the past 75 years-  whether on the small scale (My Lai) or the large (Auschwitz).

A sad commentary on just how little we have really evolved.

WaPo Neocons Despise the Pulitzer Prize and Snowden's Role - Can You Believe It?

Ordinarily in the realm of human affairs and especially journalistic achievement, a media source or newspaper would have all its denizens aboard giving resounding accolades for its win. Such was supposed to be the case earlier this week as the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded to the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper for disclosing the NSA transgressions of the Fourth Amendment.  Alas, not all the little scribes of the WaPo are on board with the award. Some have rebelled and even "staged their own demonstrations" against the award, if you can believe it.

One such malcontent is Post columnist Marc Thiessen who on Wednesday, pitched a hissy fit about the Post getting the award and Snowden being responsible. Thiessen, who writes a weekly online column for The Post, hosted an event at the American Enterprise Institute devoted in large part to denouncing the Guardian, The Post and the Pulitzer committee for their actions.

All you need to know here is that Thiessen is also an AEI "fellow". And we know AEI is a rat's nest for neocons as well as for liars about climate change. Recall that AEI sponsored a propaganda program a few years back whereby any "researchers" would be awarded $10,000 each for writing anti-climate change articles and getting them into major newspapers. I counted at least 12 who got success in this dubious outcome, once more causing delays for action. 

Anyway, in terms of the recent Pulitzers, this little rat Thiessen said journalists at The Post — “my newspaper,” as he put it — "should not have published the articles and had done something incredibly damaging to national security."

Thiessen had previously written that The Post’s actions "broke the law"  (if you regard the existing law that legalized the Bushie illegal wiretaps as a proper law), . Meanwhile, Thiessen’s guest, British member of Parliament Liam Fox, went further.

“What sort of world do we live in where that gets a Pulitzer Prize for public service?”

he asked the AEI audience.

“An award for public service for possibly the greatest betrayal of our national secrets of all time strikes me as quite bizarre. . . . I do think that there is a real danger of a very cozy media world patting itself on the back without fully understanding the consequences.”

Of course this is irredeemable rubbish. The so-called "national secrets" were in fact illegal mass searches that violated the much more fundamental law of the land embodied in the U.S. Constitution. The heart of which is putatively the 4th amendment with its proscription on the use of mass warrants and mass searches without cause. That this Brit doesn't get that is perhaps understandable, as he's not an American, but then the AEI ought not have had him bloviate about national secrets and bogus laws. But then Fox himself doesn't seem to be able to tell dog shit from chocolate.  Fox didn’t seem to know much about the Snowden dispute on this side of the Atlantic — at one point he actually  confused The Washington Post and the New York Times — and, in any event, he was much more aggrieved by what Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian had done than anything else. Clearly, the dope probably never even read the words of the Fourth Amendment - so why should he give two shits about preserving its basis?


The two miscreants then kicked around the idea that journalists "might be to blame" for future terrorist attacks. Thiessen actually asked:

“If there is another 9/11, another London subway bombing, how is this debate going to look in retrospect?”

His nincompoop Brit pal  Fox then babbled:

“The next time you get a bomb going off in the subway or a marathon, when someone’ s child is abducted by a pedophile ring, you might want to thank those who made it easier for those people to do those things.”

Oh please! Put a freakin' sock in it! The sober realist could retort here that we have tens of thousands of deaths by gun each year and basically snooze about it, and maybe we prevented 50 deaths from terrorists - if that- and yet we go batshit crazy and extirpate all our 4th amendment rights on the possibility of an attack that may take barely a tenth of the lives?

These wimps - Fox and Thiessen - need to get a life, and a pair of balls! If we can tolerate thousands of gun deaths each year and do squatto about it, I say we can tolerate huge risks to preserve our precious liberties. Journalist Robert Scheer in a blog last summer (‘The Terror Con’) has referred to “threat inflation” by which the security state keeps weak-kneed "citizens" panting for more protection like screaming school girls petrified of spiders. They will dangle any kind of threat out to try to scare the bejeezus out of wimpy Americans, the better to make them give up their 4th amendment rights.

Scheer also referenced a June 11, 2013 column by Thomas Friedman  with similar fear overtones to the shtick of Fox and Thiessen. Friedman warned that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, "we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off".

WHY lose our civil liberties? Because a bunch of zealots take out maybe thousands of lives? Fucking LESS than lost each year to gun violence! Shit, we who lived through the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis – minutes from nuclear annihilation - find this preposterous! That a nation priding itself on freedom could give up all rights like a bunch of screaming sissies just because of a limited attack! NY Times columnist Bill Keller also seemed to support the “Screaming sissy” hypothesis as when he writes:

“Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”

A panicky public? How about a bunch of pusillanimous pussies that don’t deserve freedom? A bunch that really wants their asses kicked to wake them from their scarified terrorist-bogeyman coma....which has repercussions on the rest of us (real citizens - not consumers) who value liberty over security! But maybe Fox and Thiessen - like Keller and Friedman - are on to something as when Friedman wrote on June 11:

“I believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it,”

Yeah, so the deep politics citizen must ask: What isn’t he saying?  Maybe that he knows COG (continuity of government)  will come into play and under its mandates, martial law will be permanent and we’ ll inhabit a full Nazified police state. How quickly that freedom went! Barely lasting 230- odd years!

As Scheer puts it:

“No nation in history has ever possessed such an imbalance of military superiority and the ability to ward off foreign threats without sacrificing its core values. Never has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other protections of individual sovereignty against an intrusive government. They did so out of the conviction that individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In short, they trusted in the essential wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.”


But evidently, as soon as too many citizens became mostly consumers they devolved into crying infants and fucking babies who needed the Pappy Spy State’s protections.

"WAAAAHHHHH! Please Gen. Alexander, hold me widdo hands! I don't wanna die from dem dere  t'errists!"

More important to get that new X-box, Ipad or Notebook than to tend to one’s liberties, after all. Gotta make the country safe for shopping! In this case it may be too late, and the nonchalance evident now amongst the 48 percent will mutate into memory loss of the seventy percent in another few months, evoking Bradley Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s greatest fears: that their leaks won’t have made a difference at all.

Fortunately for us, most other sensible WaPo columnists believe Thiessen is an asshole, which he is. But then anyone ensconced at a place like the American Enterprise Institute has to be at least part asshole.

Then there is Thiessen's female counterpart, a harridan and Neolib tool and fool named Ruth Marcus who I've raked over the coals before, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/12/of-tweets-and-twaddle.html

 Evidently, she's none too pleased about the attention Snowden has received, and had to spout off in one of her columns about it, writing:

" Time has not deflated Edward Snowden’s messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.

Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden’s recent interview with Barton Gellman in The Post, but it has numerous cousins: smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought.

The Snowden of Gellman’s interview is seized with infuriating certitude about the righteousness of his cause. Not for Snowden any anxiety about the implications for national security of his theft of government secrets, any regrets about his violations of a duty of secrecy."

Why should he have regrets?  And how in hell can this overpaid harpy dare say Snowden lacks " any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy" ? Obviously, if he leaked files on how American freedoms were being undermined, violated and devalued he had more than ample appreciation!  The other fact to which Miss Marcus is oblivious is that the U.S. was a signatory and primary defender of the Nuremberg Principles (first laid out after the Nuremberg War Crimes trials). The U.S. insisted (given all the Nazis in the dock had "followed orders")  that violating a government order was mandated by Nuremberg Principle VI that clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name. As Robert Scheer noted in his June 25, 2013 blog: ‘The Good Germans in Government’):

Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation.

Marcus, the NSA toady, is also oblivious to the fact that Snowden didn't "steal government secrets" but rather exposed Government misdeeds and violations of the 4th amendment. But then, such a narrow-minded little toady wouldn't see that anyway - hence she is the classic "Good German". In the Nazi era she'd have easily been one of the millions who reported on those fellow citizens hiding Jews  and she'd have been the first in line to volunteer on providing the Gestapo any information on her neighbors. Oh, she'd also have been amongst the first to declare she knew nothing about any concentration camps.

She'd also have been among the first to be led by the neck to the scene of the camps, by a U.S. military escort - to have her nose rubbed in it, lest she miss it. 

But Marcus isn't content to provide us with clues that she's the ultimate "Good German" in American guise, she sets out to prove it by writing:


" The whistleblower personality is rarely an attractive one. Whistleblowers tend to be the difficult ones, the sort who tend to feel freer to speak out precisely because they don’t fit in. So perhaps it is not a surprise that the biggest whistleblower of all time has an unpleasant personality to match. And personality would not matter — at least it would not be so grating — if Snowden’s behavior were more upstanding and his actions more justified.

On behavior, if Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions? "

Of course, we know and have learned from history - especially the German experience-  that whistle blowers are indeed a special type. But this is understandable to those of us who have personalities that "don't fit in" - because we are enabled the opportunity to perceive things from without, by altering our perspective, which our compatriots seem unable to do. Because we can do this, we are more apt to detect things that are amiss and hence feel obliged to report them. But that doesn't mean Snowden has an "unpleasant personality" as Marcus portrays it, only that she - as a toady 'Good German' type, can't abide it. Can't abide his forthright moral honesty and adherence to higher principles, which she is so prepared to sacrifice (as a paid propagandist) at the drop of a hat.

As for her ridiculous question about Snowden not sticking around to "test the Constitution" - well obviously because given what he unearthed he knew the Constitution had been perverted by a gangster state - prepared to undermine basic principles to achieve its own lawless outcomes.  Hence, he wouldn't be able to properly defend himself or his principles. (At least until the Constitutional principles are restored - which was the purpose of his leaks.)

He would be in an analogous position to a whistle blower German -exposing the Nazi riff raff- brought before the Reich Courts - which also had twisted the (Weimar) laws to fit their agendas.  But recall that in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, it was those Reich Courts and Reich laws, that were on trial as well.

What we learn from the likes of Ruth Marcus and Marc Thiessen is that the archetype of the Good German lives on in the modern U.S. of A. These people will easily don the garb of patriotism, just like the Nazis of old did, but we know it's all a sham designed to advance their own despicable agendas. After all, patriotism is the "last refuge of scoundrels" in the words of Doctor Samuel  Johnson.

 

No, Nanette, Government is NOT Your 'Friend' or ' Daddy'!

Right: Nazi defendants wait to be tried at Nuremberg. It was the 'good Germans,' who saw no evil after Hitler came to power , who were responsible for the chaos the 3rd Reich caused.

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED." - Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'.

Yesterday, our dear friend 'Nanette' visited from Aurora, and we had a really good breakfast before having a heavy conversation about Snowden, the NSA, citizens and rights.  'Nanette' like so many 'Muricans, felt in her heart of hearts that Snowden had "betrayed" his country  and merely created hysteria about the NSA mass surveillance programs like PRISM. There was nothing whatever to fret about and the NSA was merely carrying out its mission to protect us from the millions who want to kill us. If you didn't do anything wrong, NSA wouldn't be tracking your every move. Just be a 'good guy' and move on, oh, and stop complaining!

When I mentioned the 'continuity of Government' (COG) program given teeth by the  Bushistas through Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act, and how it provided for domestic protestors (like Occupy Wall Street and anti-frackers) to be labeled "terrorists" - and noted  how the Occupy demonstrators were tracked and hounded-  she merely shrugged her shoulders:

"I don't protest or complain so I have nothing to worry about."

When I told her that the same Sec. 215 allowed federal agents to break into a home and rifle through computer files and other documents without having to tell you, she just smiled - that was for others to worry about because she had nothing to cause any alarm. Only photos of her two kitties.

When I noted the 'Main Core' program and how 8 million innocent Americans were already listed under it, people who'd done nothing except perhaps speak out against the Afghan adventure and the waste of money involved, she just laughed. It doesn't mean a thing and no one is going to do anything with it. She would become a true believer if people started to get arrested and their doors get knocked down.

To her it was quite fine and dandy and not worth worrying or fretting over because, after all, government was good to us, our "friend" or at least 'Daddy': it paved our roads, it paid our benefits - like her Social Security and Medicare- and it regulated her foods so there were no salmonella infections, and supplied money for our schools (ok, at least the better ones through 'No Child Left Behind' and 'Race to the Top') and it protected us from all those bad guys that Clapper and Alexander keep warning us about.

When I cited the stat - from a Gideon Rachman Financial Times article, e.g.






and that "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack", compared to  a one in 346,000 chance of being annihilated by a large asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) she again just shrugged. She still knew in her heart of hearts that the government was protecting her.

When I informed her the same gov't she praised for paving her roads also started wars that couldn't be paid for, she was mostly speechless. Finally, she agreed I had a point. When I added to that those unpaid for wars (as well as tax cut for the rich) meant cuts to her domestic S.S. and Medicare benefits she said she'd "wait and see". I added that, in case she forgot, the Supreme Court in a ruling some years back stated that no benefits are enshrined and the government could reduce them or even eliminate them.

In other words, her image of a benevolent government largely depended on who was in power:  which party - and who in that party had what agenda in the Executive branch. It was certainly not a 'slam dunk' that in each election cycle we'd get the government we need or want. (And no one can dismiss the power of money to trump our votes,  negating her argument that "we" get the gov't we deserve via our voting choices.)  It could be a malevolent one with no citizen rights at heart, and no incentive to "promote the general welfare" as stated in the Preamble of the Constitution. As for the Bill of Rights, it was a truism that if people didn't use them then they'd lose them.


'Nanette' in this sense did appear to see the paradox of the NSA going ape shit to reign in terrorists with its mass surveillance dragnet (that didn't discriminate good guys from bad)  but not attending to the millions of cockeyed gun owners with their AR-15s, Bushmaster .223s and other weapons - all 2nd amendment rights aficionados, when thousands of times more people were murdered than killed by terrorists each year.


But then these gun zealots - unlike 4th amendment civil libertarians - might go bonkers if threatened with the remote loss of any of their current rights.. At least she saw the divergence in government obsession between protecting 2nd and 4th amendment rights. The 2nd amendment folks struck fear in the heart of government, but not 4th amendment rights folks. (As I noted in an earlier blog post, protecting 4th amendment rights is always more difficult because they are largely intangible and people don't see when they're losing them. By contrast a gun owner can instantly see when he's losing his Bushmaster or Glock 9mm).

I tried my best to show Nanette it is the citizen's job to oversee and pay attention to what the government is doing, and not be asleep at the switch. I read to her Jefferson's quotes (above) and indicated that a real citizen had to treat government more or less like a toddler of immense power that might wander off the beaten path at any time -depending on political winds, or outside agents.

As MIT's Noam Chomsky put it in a recent interview:

"Governments are power systems. They are trying to sustain their power and domination over their populations and they will use what means are available to do this. By now the means are very sophisticated and extensive and we can expect them to increase. So for instance, if you read technology journals you learn that in robotics labs for some years there have been efforts to develop small drones, what they call “fly-sized drones,” which can intrude into a person’s home and be almost invisible and carry out constant surveillance. You can be sure that the military is very much interested in this, and the intelligence systems as well, and will soon be using it."

So true.  The saddest part of our exchange is the extent to which I realized that Nanette was like the millions of good Germans who, had they paid attention and done their homework, might have averted the catastrophe of the Third Reich - by not turning a blind eye to what was going on. (In Nanette's view that'd never happen today since we're more "civilized". Hmmm... I reminded her that the Germans with their Goethe and Bach also fancied themselves to be).

Ironically, we Americans - who had to sacrifice so many lives to liberate Europe from Hitler's grasp- had no tolerance for any of the 'good Germans' - a historical point many 'good Americans' today would do well to ponder.  Go back to the end of World War II and the American occupation of Germany in the years after 1945. We assailed the “weak” German people and mocked them for not standing up to the growing metastasis of Hitler’s Reich which they obviously saw but did nothing about. Hell, too many sided with Hitler, praised him and embraced his ideology while turning a blind eye to the wrongs. The last straw was the Enabling Act (1933) which essentially obliterated the last vestiges of the Weimar Republic. Our military also dragged out these “good Germans” and trotted them into the remnant concentration camps to see first hand what their Fuhrer and his minions did. They were marched in and forced to look at the naked, gassed bodies stacked like cordwood until they puked.

Meanwhile, our then military leaders rounded up the remaining high profile Nazis, including Hermann Goering (see photo) , and dragged them before a Tribunal to be accountable for their actions. (Read the book, ‘Judgment at Nuremburg’ or see the movie). Though they gave the excuse they were only “following orders” we didn’t buy it. We demanded a higher moral standard that NO one is obliged to follow orders to serve such vile ends and there exists higher moral law that trumps “orders” or “oaths”.

The U.S. insisted instead that violating a government order was mandated by the principle (VI) that the United States trumpeted in the Nuremberg war crime trials. Principle VI came to be known as the Nuremberg Code and clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."


Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name. As Robert Scheer noted in a June 25 blog, ‘The Good Germans in Government’:

Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation

I ended our conversation (moving back to more light-heated fare)  by suggesting to Nanette that she read the 4th amendment again and carefully, and take note that mass warrants were not permitted. The government had to seek out and issue individualized warrants specific to the perpetrators and context. It didn't matter if this "took time", or was "inconvenient" - that is what the amendment stated.

Why, I asked her, should we empower the government to take away our 4th amendment rights any more than the gun owners allow the government to take  away their 2nd amendment rights?

She had no answer, but she promised to read the Bill of Rights again as her first resolution for this year. Let us hope millions of our fellow citizens do the same, in between their shopping excursions, instagrams and Facebook-ing.

Meanwhile, the fathead fool and dickhead Peter King (R- NY) has flipped out at the NY Times editorial board calling them "apologists for terrorists"- for calling for clemency for  Edward Snowden. See,

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/02/gops_peter_king_flips_out_on_the_new_york_times/

This asshole still claims Snowden is a “traitor” -  despite the fact Ed has done more to protect this nation's honor and principles than the fat bag of blowhard gas has done in all his years sitting in congress.  The real traitors are pigs like King, and we need to call them out and say so!