This is what I've been trying to tell my Obamaniac friends in our Quaker men's group--he's not going to give up any of the power Bush, and Clinton before him, grasped. Those who expect any substantive rollback of the government's assaults on civil liberties are going to be very disappointed.

Yet I expect that somehow, someway, they will be disappointed in Bush.

The good news is that they never were assaults on our civil liberties. It's never been a civil liberty to communicate without fear of interception, during wartime, with possible enemies.

Lincoln had crews out tapping telegraph lines constantly. On the first day of WWI, Wilson ordered the surveillance of overseas cable traffic. FDR did the same, and added phone traffic. Same idea throughout our history, often updated for new technology. And no stinkin' warrants, ever.

And our real civil liberty was always intact, because these warrentless taps were at no time in our history admissible in criminal actions. If Bush taps your call to Somalia, and you brag about having robbed a bank, there isn't a thing he can legally do about it.

Bush has merely updated this to the odd conditions of the Internet Age and 4th generation warfare. We do not have the right to e-mail to Pakistan with impunity, and we never did, in time of war. Get out your Ouija board and ask General Washington. He'll tell you I'm right. He had lots of letters opened.

The whole argument has been hypocrisy and bullshit from the beginning.

And hey, another bit of good news. Now there's a chance leftists will notice these simple obvious facts. Now that they are advantageous to them. Hey lefties, read RJ and find out how to fight the Global War on Terror!

And the other reason this whole argument is total garbage is that the entire trend of our history has been towards increasing civil liberties. (That's reason #465 why leftists always discourage the study of history.)

The thing that makes me tear my hair out is that Bush has been more tender of our liberties than any major war-time President in the past. You people have just no idea, because you are ignorant. Or indifferent to truth.

Lafeyette Baker would have tossed your ass into Old Capitol Prison, Dave, and no one would have cared if you got out alive. Wilson threw conscientious objectors into prison, and shut down hundreds of newspapers. FDR interned a hundred-thousand Japs, and did lots of other hair-raising things.

And if you were honest, Dave, you would take note of the fact that much of what Bush does (and Barack Obama WILL do) is forced upon us by the vile terrorist tactics of our enemies. We would much prefer to fight a uniformed enemy out in the open. Why don't your Quaker pals start protesting when terrorists set up fake charities and use them to route money to be used to kill innocent civilians? If you were really pacifists you would find that objectionable, and sympathize with the authorities who have to use surveillance to stop them.

I suppose I'm being too vehement, but I'm righteously pissed about Leftist hypocrisy on this. (and I'm drinking gin, instead of Scotch.) People claiming some past wonderland of civil liberties (which Bush has now shredded) is sort of like those people in the old days who said that they had no negro problems, because their darkies were all smiling and happy.

50 or 100 years ago, if you got out of line in wartime you would be f----g pulverized. Ground to powder. So hey, there were no problems with civil liberties. Everybody was smiling and happy, weren't they?

Nobody would violate your liberties in the old days. They would just, as Tom Pullings put it, nail your ears to a plank and set you afloat, to learn you bashfulness....

...and you didn't even have to collaborate with the enemy to get yourself in trouble. I had a great-grandfather who was thrown in jail during WWI for his labor activities. Ah yes, the good old days, before the evil Republicans became so damn powerful.

It's just like race issues. Most of the ugly work has been done by Democrats, but Republicans get tagged as the racists!

The deeper issue under all of this is that we who are lucky enough to be citizens of this greatest of countries owe her a solemn duty of love and loyalty. It is a shocking thing to see people turn on this country, especially when they continue to wallow like pigs in the great prosperity she makes possible. And even worse, to trash our government and our military while continuing to wallow in the security guaranteed by the ceaseless labors of our various security forces.

This is a disgusting betrayal, and I like to think that the betrayers have some shreds of conscience left, and that that's why they manufacture phony "crimes" to accuse the government of. They need psychological cover for the moral wrong they are committing.

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