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July 22, 2005

A good American always fears

I'm not afraid.

I don't ride the subways with trepidation. I don't worry about airliners crashing into buildings. I'm not apprehensive about going to tourist attractions and historic places (unless you count an annoyance with crowds as apprehension).

So I look at the fear and justifications behind therenewal of the Patriot Act and I have to wonder why.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House voted by a wide margin Thursday night to renew expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the collection of antiterrorism measures passed after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The final vote was 257-171. The bill makes permanent 14 of 16 provisions in the act set to expire next year and extends two others for another 10 years.

Passage came with the specter of terrorism fresh in lawmakers' minds after another round of bombing incidents in London earlier in the day.

These measures seem like so much smoke and mirrors to me, a pat on the head to reassure us plebes that everything is all right and Big Daddy Government Suit will take care of everything. But Big Daddy Government suit was wooing the Taliban, the same group who is our sworn enemy. Big Daddy Government Suit has been playing footsie with the Saudis, who spawned the uber fundamentalist branch of Islam that Osama Bin Laden loves so. Big Daddy Government Suit exorts us to go shopping, gives us tax breaks on SUVs, and sends people off to invade and occupy a sovereign nation with shifting and false justifications as to why. Big Daddy Government Suit would rather we keep troops in the Middle East to maintain access to oil. Better to stay enslaved to oil, destroy our environment, and make oil tycoons rich.

You'll just have to forgive me if I look askance at Big Daddy Government Suit.

Where's Osama? We've been concentrating so hard on Iraq--a nation that was never a threat to us, a nation that did not have ties to Al Qaeda--that the real threat has been free to plan, and plot, and kill. Al Qaeda is not on the run--it's their style to hide under rocks like the snakes they are.

Where's our intel? Granted, the administration would either rather not listen to what they have to say--part of Big Daddy Government Suit's "I'm not trying to hear that" policy--or they blithely compromise our agents out in the field. And then they tell us we are in terrible danger, awful danger,imminent danger. Terrorists could be anywhere and could strike at anytime. We must be vigilant. To protect ourselves, we should give up the rights to privacy, resign ourselves to a long occupation in Iraq, We should accept the fact that we can hold people in prison indefinitely, without charges, with no chance of contacting a lawyer or his family. We should accept a debate on the merits of torture as part and parcel of our brave new world of freedom.

We're freaking out over what happened in England, but this isn't the first time they were bombed. Terrorism is nothing new to them, thanks to the IRA. It's nothing new to the Spanish, the Germans, or the Italians, either, all who have or had home-grown groups with a love affair of bombs and guns. (It's not unheard of in Japan, for that matter.)

We have our own terrorists as well, and our own acts of terrorism. Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh, the Army of God, the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, "Leaderless Resistance," oh, the list goes on. Their attacks have been lethal, terrorized people, and left maimed and broken survivors in their wake. But Big Daddy Government Suit felt no panic when these nice white Christian boys did the killing.

But now that it wasn't white boys doing the killing, now that it was olive-skinned Muslims, we have a crisis. Instead of responding by looking at what went wrong the first time and fixing it (there's really no shame in law enforcement agencies sharing information and following up on tips), we are using terrorism as the bogeyman to keep us in line, keep us cowed, and keep us afraid. Because fear justifies Big Daddy Government Suit's rampage.

But even some of Big Daddy Government Suit's allies have had enough:

Lawmakers narrowly turned back an effort by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Virginia, to renew the expiring Patriot Act provisions for four more years, rather than making them permanent -- an amendment that drew spirited support from archconservative Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California.

Rohrabacher said he supported the Patriot Act in 2001 because of the threat faced by the country after 9/11, but only under the belief that once the emergency was over, "the government would again return to a level consistent with a free society."

"We should not be required to live in peacetime under the extraordinary laws that were passed during times of war and crisis. Emergency powers of investigation should not become the standard once the crisis has passed," he said, drawing applause from his colleagues.

This is exactly what Big Daddy Government Suit is trying to do. Keep the sense of crisis up, the sense up panic up to red. That way we can stand for human rights by ignoring them, fight for democracy by supporting anti-democratic governments, and fight for freedom by destroying it.

Posted by at July 22, 2005 05:33 AM