Wiretaps without warrants.
This seems pretty simple to me: I want the government to spy on terrorists. But I don't want the government to spy on everyone. Warrants act as a check step to make sure that we're actually spying on bad guys. If you can't get the warrant for a real terrorist, under the current political climate and rules, you're not just incompetent; you're keystone-cops incompetent. Eliminating the warrant makes abuses of power easier; cynics might say it makes abuses of power inevitable.What I don't understand is why republicans who used to be against big government suddenly want to give that same government unchecked and seemingly infinite power. Heck, I thought they loved the second amendment because of a deep mistrust of governmental power. Republicans, you're supposed to hate this kind of thing!
This flip-flop from one of the core republican principles seems inexplicable; even if they fundamentally trust the current administration, why do they implicitly trust the next administration, and the next, and the next? If we don't allow the constitution to set limits on the office of president, it seems like he has no limits at all. That's not democratic, and that's not American.
I've not sure I've gone where I wanted with this post. But the first four or five versions of this entry pretty much all ended with a paragraph of stream-of-consciousness profanity, so this will have to do.
Tags: politics, wiretaps, president, republicans, constitution
posted by IvyMike @ 1/05/2006 11:30:00 PM
3 Comments:
Republicans, you're supposed to hate this kind of thing!
I think there are some classic Republicans that do stand for what the Republican party used to be, but most Republicans now don't think too much beyond "Republican is my party, so I support what they do".
It seems more and more that politics is about being on a "team". You root for your team and ignore the "minor indescresions" that your team may make. Now i'm a liberial so I'm obviously biased, but it seems more and more that republicans fall in this trap in significantly higher numbers than that other party.
How can you have a party that is for the rich win elections when only a very small percentage of US citizens are rich? How does someone convince poor people to vote for a party that gives lots of tax cuts to the rich? Simple, just focus on non-issues like gay mariage, abortion and the god in the pledge. Say a lot of words but don't do anything, then vote in all the tax cuts that you want. That is the exact attitude that gets republicans arguing FOR unlimited unwarrented goverment wiretaps instead of against them.
Welcome to the land of the free, home of the stupid. god bless the USA.
Don,
The thing that's still a mystery for me is that in most cases, when the republicans support something that I disagree with, there's at least some rationale that adheres to well-known republican core principles.
In this case, I don't see that at all. Authorizing warrantless wiretaps is against the law, increases the size of government, and is the beginning of something Orwellian. The only reason I think to support it is if you're so scared of terrorists that you're willing to sacrifice all of your other principles to feel a little safer. Maybe that's all that there is.
Now that I think about it, I guess the movement towards legitimizing torture feels about the same.
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