The Chucksphere

I began this on the 23rd of last month. It’s a little less current, but I still want to put in my two cents.

Everyone remembers when some conservative pundits went absolutely apeshit over the release of a memo detailing the growth of “right wing extremist activity”? How they howled that this new liberal administration was going to crack down and hunt them down? And how that memo was actually commisioned by the Bush Administration? And how there was a corresponding report about liberal extremists?

To be fair, there is some room for criticism all around. While it may be useful for the FBI to compile information on potential domestic terrorist groups, how to determine which groups are simply nuicences, and which are capable of violence can be hard to see. On the one hand, as the commander of the VFW says, “A government that does not assess internal and external security threats would be negligent of a critical public responsibility”; on the other, too broad of investigations can lead to government infiltation of “ groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty, and poverty relief.” The trick is drawing the line between being able to investigate potential terrorists, and engaging in a sort of Orwellian spying on all non-government organizations. Personally, I would err on the side of protecting our rights and not wasting resources by limiting surveilence.

An another note, I object to Greenwald’s tone in this article. He almost seems to be defending the spying on right-wing groups as their just deserts after the excesses and abuses of the Bush years. It is ironic that the same people who applauded, say, domestic wiretapping threw a shitstorm when they thought they were in the crosshairs. Nonetheless, it has been used as political cannon-fodder by the right, with talking heads claiming that they are being targeted, when any moron can see that they were not the intended target. They thrive on their persecution complexes, or so it seems. Nobody deserves to be spied on by their own government, by their representitives and guardians. Wishing it on someone as a kind of poetic justice is, in fact, unjust. While it may reveal the depths of the pimping out of truth to “spin” in politics, I hope that we can, in the course of the next four years, move out of this surveilence society we seem to be inching toward.

Right-wing Memo

Left-wing Memo