...what's particularly delicious is that your Hillary Clintons and your Barack Obamas and your Democratic Congresscreatures all see the plain future of 2008, in which yawning fools like Digby and chirping careerists like Markos Moulitas and a whole passel of other Netrootsian Democrats, all of whom are ever and always along for the ride, doing their damndest to put a Democrat in charge of it all! They're front-loading everything and the kitchen sink into the swollen gift-bag of Executive power so that the Clinton dynasty can expand magisterially into its role and worry about important things, like new rugs and china. The Democratic candidates all understand that they could rape babies in Times Square, and Glenn Greenwald would write a post about how the George W. Bush administration has done unprecedented damage to the convention against baby rape; Digby would write a post beginning with "I can't for the life of me figure out . . ."; Atrios would write a one-sentence post that says, "Remind me why we're raping babies again?"; FireDogLake would ignore the baby raping to live-blog "Joseph Wilson has totally hot sex with his hot wife"; DailyKos would explain to us how electing John McNobody in the Million-and-First district of rural Northern California will prove that Joe Lieberman is a bad man; the folks over at The Poor Man will blame it on "The New Naderism"; Lawyers, Guns, and Money will explain that Libertarians R Stoopid; and Josh Marshall will surprise us by pointing out that this one Republican, he totally, like, lied one time, and we can prove it!

...liberals like Greenwald act shocked when the Dems do something that they've always done, namely, help screw tighter the political vise while enabling reactionary elements among ruling circles. This is the Dems' main purpose, and if someone supposedly fluent in law can't see it, then frankly, he's worthless as a political commentator.

...

I don't know if Greenwald was writing political commentary during Bill Clinton's two administrations, but if he was, do you suppose he had the same concern for constitutional liberties then that he ostensibly has now? Recall that Clinton, primarily though the passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, but also through his expansion of police state measures (explosion of SWAT and Delta teams and accelerated prison building), attack on habeas corpus, approval of roving wiretaps, among other forms of state control, set the table for what we're now seeing. Think FISA, or for that matter, the Patriot Act, came out of nowhere? That dismemberment of the Constitution is an exclusive Republican feature? Let's also throw in one of the most open violations of the Fourth Amendment, the federal assault and mass murder at Waco, an assault that many liberals still celebrate. Where was the dewy-eyed love of the Constitution then? Bill Clinton did more to undermine that supposedly sacred document than most other presidents before him, and allowed George W. Bush to build on that. And yet, Clinton remains a liberal hero.

If Greenwald protested all this in real time, then good for him. But based on what I read by him now, I seriously doubt that he raised much of a fuss. Very few liberals did. So, when leading libloggers like Greenwald acknowledge the systemic reasons for our awful condition, reasons that are pretty easy to look up, then perhaps I'll take his avowed concern for the Constitution more seriously. Until then, he's part of the problem.

posted by Scats : 8/09/2007 02:33:00 AM