I Think We Already Lost the War On TerrorAll I'm saying is that we are spying on Americans without court supervision. And at least some people are not outraged by this because they are more afraid of another terrorist attack than of
BIG Brother. At the heart of this problem is the fact that our Administration obviously never took that key FDR line to heart ("we have nothing to fear but fear itself"). Instead, they set out to scare the shit out of everyone over the last four years. And for the most part, they have succeeded in doing so.
I recently spoke to my father-in-law about the spying scandal. His attitude about the lack of warrants was an eye-opener. He all but acknowledged that the Administration had taken a shortcut around the law. However, he genuinely did not care because he felt his safety was at issue. He was not just speaking as a Bush apologist. Essentially, I think he's one of the many that have been won over by the Administration's post 9/11 culture of fear.
And on this subject, TPM
points out that the constant barrage of terror alerts actually stopped immediately after the 2004 election. I wonder if the cycle of alerts will spring back to life this spring or summer if the GOP's numbers are still in the tank with mid-term elections approaching.
Perhaps if Al Gore had won in 2000, there wouldn't have been some of those great scenes in the days after 9/11 like Bush in the New York rubble with the megaphone. But you know what? There certainly would not have been any of this Code Orange Terror Status "Sort of Scary" or
Terror Alert level Bert bullshit. And Americans wouldn't be crapping their pants about terrorists to the point where there would even be a discussion about the legality of spying on Americans. We would not be frightened out of our wits and, thus, Al Gore would be rightly impeached for ordering what Bush requested of the NSA.
Oh yeah... and while talking about the war on terror, I might as well mention that the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban on September 11, 2001 -- i.e. the actual bad guys that our administration is hoping you forgot about when we captured Saddam -- are both still at large despite the expense of thousands of American troops killed, tens of thousands of civilians dead, and hundreds of billions of American dollars spent fighting in and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan.
Somewhere out there, Omar and bin Laden have been hearing about what's happened in America since 9/11 and are probably laughing their asses off. 9/11 was only one day. On September 12, 2001, America was united like never before and had the sympathies of all nations. At that point, the terrorists had won nothing. The terrorists' true victory lies in the alarmist and heavy-handed response of the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress since then. We've blown our money, our cached international good will, and have lost thousands of men and women. And the net result is that we are just as frightened, have less civil liberty, and are probably no safer thanks to the extreme damage we have done to our own international image.
Though al-Qaeda was responsible for the terror of September 2001, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Congress are much more to blame for the terror of October 2001 through December 2005.
