House Dems Near Surrender on Bush Spying

[SHRED]

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Folding over and giving in...again.
The Bush Crime Syndicate is laughing their collective asses off.
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House Dems Near Surrender on Bush Spying
Ari Melber

~SNIP~

Unlike the Senate leadership, senior House Democrats have been fighting Bush's demand that telecommunications companies receive blanket amnesty for warrantless surveillance. Even when Bush refused to sign an extension of the surveillance bill without amnesty, the Democrats held firm and let the measure expire, drawing attack ads and fear-mongering from the G.O.P. By surrendering now, Democrats would not only ratify the administration's assault on the rule of law. They would also be practicing a self-destructive brand of political cannibalism that thins their ranks and enervates their base. Salon's Glenn Greenwald explains it in crushing detail, which I think is worth quoting at length:

The signs are unmistakably clear that what was always inevitable -- full compliance by the House Democratic leadership with Bush's demands on warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty -- is now imminent... There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented....But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And now, after picking this fight and letting it rage for weeks, they are going to do what they always do -- just meekly give in to the President, yet again generating a tidal wave of headlines trumpeting how they bowed, surrendered, caved in, and lost to the President. They're going to cast the appearance that they engaged this battle and once again got crushed, that they ran away in fear because of the fear-mongering ads that were run and the attacks from the President. They further demoralize their own base and increase the contempt in which their base justifiably holds them (if that's possible). It's almost as though they purposely picked the path that imposed on themselves all of the political costs with no benefits.


LINK:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=293967

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[noise]

1. It doesn't get more anti-American

than discarding the 4th amendment because some wanna-be dictator claims he can't do his job without the crutch of police state powers.

The Bush crowd has tried very hard to convince the public that authoritarianism=patriotism.