Where are Our Liberal Fighters?

The NSA snooping scandal get worse every day.  It turns out rampant spying without any court oversight is happening on a widespread scale.  Using a loose interpretation of a single FISA Court ruling data is being collected on American Citizens and used constantly and consistently.  We clearly have a government completely and totally out of control.

Amy Davidson, writing in The New Yorker, called the FISA ruling a secret FISA court order "a gift certificate for one year of warrant-free spying "

Curiously we don't have a single evil dictator or despot.  That's the good news.  President Obama is aloof, incompetent and largely unaware.  As I've written several times before, Barack Obama isn't the President, he just plays one on TV.  But he is not evil.

Looking at his reception at the G8 last week and his laughable speech to a tiny crowd in Berlin, his star is fading, like every television star whose time has passed.  But I digress.

The bad news is that the government has become this powerful and evil all by itself.  A badly written law here, an over zealous bureaucrat there and you have institutional evil, a government totally out of control.  The Constitution is meaningless.  Your rights, rights you actually had until five or six years ago, are gone and perhaps gone forever.

What worries me most is that our protectors, our guardians of justice and liberty have gone silent.  They have disappeared into partisan political oblivion.  The Liberal Media, the ACLU, the great Liberal crusaders have all gone silent, mumbling nonsensical platitudes in the dark.

Have you read the essays or listened to the Progressive pundits over on MSNBC?  I've read some of the most frightening, convoluted defenses of the status quo I have ever seen.  No logic, no defending the down trodden, no standing up for the rights of the common man, just mumbling about how it was bound to happen anyway.  

The leaders who fought so eloquently, so vocally and occasionally fought so violently against the war in Viet Nam, now tell me everything is perfectly OK as long as we're not doing anything illegal anyway.  "If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear."

One of the greatest Progressive voices on Twitter is the brilliant and unyielding Shoq.  He is a voice I greatly respect.  His black cat avatar is beloved by thousands and feared by his opponents.  

I recently engaged Shoq about his defense of the government's abuse of spying power and ignoring of our traditional Constitutional rights.  Quick to misinterpret my questions as an attack on President Obama, his instantly replied that Obama had done nothing wrong and, indeed, Obama has done nothing.

But, I asked, how can allow this power to fall into the hands of the next President, most likely a Republican.  Shoq's reply was simple but I fear terribly naive  "We must be careful of who we elect...."

Shoq has written a lengthy essay about the NSA and the attacks on the NSA Spying by Glenn Greenwald and The CATO Institute here.   It's an interesting read that puts a great deal of blame for the current controversy on the Koch Brothers.  You'll also always find links to Shoq's latest blog essay on the right column of my blog.

Other Progressive have multiple views of the NSA scandal, almost all defensive.  First they mount a defense to protect President Obama or the "government" in general.  Then they defend the indefensible attack on our liberty and freedom with the "... unlike President Bush, Obama got a court opinion, and he's really a good guy..." scenario.

The great Liberals of my youth who mounted the illegal protests against the Viet Nam War at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention, the Liberals who used an illegal leak to bring down the Nixon Presidency because of the SPYING at Watergate, those Liberals who dared to break the law in their fight for our rights in Selma, Birmingham and Jackson, those Liberals are gone.....