More in Sorrow than in Anger Post
Neolibertarians and civil liberties-minded conservatives are aghast today at the Information Awareness Office, headed by killer clown John “Convictions Overturned on Appeal” Poindexter. First, and it gives this site no pleasure to say this, Advantage: Unqualified Offerings. UO brought the Poindexter story to the blogosphere last July, in Annals of Upward Failure and The Poindexter Beat.
Unqualified Offerings tried to tell you.
The other thing that’s alarming the otherwise pro-war folks mentioned in the first paragraph is the swift passage of the Homeland Security bill. Glenn Reynolds has been in the forefront of hoping this monster would die of gridlock, but he’s had company from many like-minded fellows. (On this issue, UO definitely counts as a like-minded fellow.)
Really, guys, what did you expect? Bush proposed it, Bush campaigned for it, Bush insisted the day after the election that the newly Republican congress pass the thing as submitted, and here it is. You mostly cheered the end of the gridlock that was all that kept this turkey in the freezer. Now we get the HSD and the IAO and, as William Safire puts it
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.
You don’t like it, my neo friends, and that’s to your credit, but in your small way you helped to bring it about. You did this by imagining that the likes of Robert Fisk were a bigger danger to you than John Poindexter. You did it by imagining that somehow the part you liked about the Bush administration – war on your target of choice – was separate and distinct from the part you didn’t like – HSD, IAO, the brute-force linkage of the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, USA-PATRIOT. You put more energy into refuting “idiotarian” claims that our liberties had already been taken away than into fighting the people who were, right out in front of god and everybody, working to take them away in earnest. You imagined that war and repression somehow don’t go together, even that war could function to inoculate against repression. You forgot or never saw a very important adage of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s:
Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.
If you imagine yourselves as part of some coalition, ask yourself what you’re getting for your trouble. You lost HSD. You lost USA-PATRIOT. You get IAO. An independent 9/11 commission? Gone. A lot of you favor liberal rules on therapeutic cloning. Think you’ll get that from this Congress? Is there anything whatsoever that neolibertarians favor that the rest of the Republican coalition does not where you have gotten or expect to get your way? Any case where the Administration said “We’ve got to give the libertarians this?” Or where you can imagine them saying it? Remember, the war doesn’t count. The neocons want it and the Christian Coalition wants it. They matter. Ditto for the tax cut. I’m talking about something that neolibertarians hold dear that neocons and/or the Christian Right oppose, where the will of the neolibertarians prevails.
I’m here every day. You can get back to me.
A proposition: Neolibertarians are to the Republican Party what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party – taken for granted because they have nowhere else to go.
We really weren’t kidding, guys. War is the health of the state. It’s time to stop imagining that this government will give you a generation-long war and occupation of however many countries without piling up the internal security measures, time to stop pretending that you have a box over here marked Good! that contains Don and Condi and a box over here marked Bad! that contains Ashcroft and Ridge and Mineta and that you get to pick one and not the other.
It’s like I’ve been saying.
