More on the Police State

It would be nice to say that, if a Democrat wins the presidency, the Democrats hold onto the House, and also expand their majority in the Senate to a filibuster proof 60+, the police state system that has emerged since 9/11 will be dismantled, but I would be a sucker for believing that.

This would have to make some serious assumptions. For one, we’d have to believe Democrats are willing to combat corporations who are participating in and profiting from the emerging police state. They’re more likely than Republicans to take on corporations, but you have to figure that at most that’s half of them, and at best, this would be no more than 30% of either body of Congress. You can see how many were willing to let credit card companies have their way with screwing the populace, and how just uneager most of them are to stop wiretapping and to not grant immunity to telecom companies.

Another would be that they would stop worrying about being called “weak” on national security. This has been the standard operating procedure for decades now. If the Democrats take a position opposite to Republicans on matters deemed part of national security, they are called weak. Often, they meekly backtrack and just cede the argument to the Republicans, as if that doesn’t make you also look weak or even stop the other side from calling you weak in the future. This fear is why too many Democrats have to now backtrack, apologize, and restate their position on why they voted for the AUMF on Iraq back in 2002, which presents a new type of weakness in Republican-land: changing your position. Does anyone think controlling the government will change this? Of course not. Even with solid control, I still expect the Democrats to allow the Republicans to write the rules of the game.

Lastly, I think that the temptation to use this police state system for their own benefit will be far too great for them to resist, so the assumption would be, do they resist temptation and destroy it. It’ll be like the all powerful ring in Tolkien’s trilogy. They’ll think that they are the ones who can use it correctly to protect the country. But that’ll transform into desire for keeping power, which will lead to destroying their political opponents and opposition groups. The irony is that, faced with this, a deep minority Republican party changes the tune its held the last seven years and works to dismantle it. It’s all done for their selfish ends, of course, as they use the issue to label Democrats as fascists who want to watch every move you make (and the irony of the fact that the Republicans were actually fascists who were actually watching every move you made will be completely lost on them).

I think the sad fact we will learn is that once you allow a police state to exist, it becomes impossible to remove it regardless of the party in charge. If you think it’ll benefit your party, you’re a shortsighted fool. If you think you’ll just change it once your party has power, you’re in for a rude awakening when you find where your party really stands. This is why the Constitution was created—to protect people from tyranny, not so a tyranny could emerge claiming it was protecting the people. Unfortunately, I think the groundwork of tyranny has been laid and it will be very difficult to undo it.

Spitzer and the Police State

Eliot Spitzer, governor of New York, resigned today after admitting to being a client of a high-priced prostitution ring. This dramatic downfall is disappointing and, as painful as it is to see a Democratic star go down, his resignation is the right thing to do given the nature of the political environment we’re in. If this were Europe, say, he’d only go down if he were running the ring or having it operate out of the governor’s mansion. But this isn’t Europe. This is USA 2008, where sex outside of your marriage is more egregious than, say, starting a war under false pretenses and turning the nation’s intelligence on its people for your own political needs. You have to seriously wonder what Eliot Spitzer, a former attorney general and well immersed in the law, was thinking. Given what Bush and the Republicans have done to justice in this country—completely politicizing the process to the point where public servants serve the Republican party ahead of the public itself—he should’ve known better.

I’d venture that Spitzer was probably among the top 5 Democrats in the nation that were in office that had a target on his/her back, with the others being Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. Spitzer went after Wall Street and corporations, and I’m sure there’s uproarious schadenfreude occurring as I’m writing this at related institutions around the country. I’m sure that, to some degree, this will translate into negation of the work that Spitzer has done, meaning that his stance against corruption has now been rendered moot because he got busted buying the services of prostitutes, and judgments and laws will have to be reversed because they came from the immoral Spitzer.

I’m sure it will be considered tinfoil-hat conspiracy stuff to say that, with the assistance of corporations, a Republican-headed justice apparatus specifically targeted Spitzer, a Democrat, to destroy him. But with all the other “wild” conspiracy-theory type stuff that has emerged as truth—we were manipulated into war with Iraq, the government has been illegally spying on many Americans, U.S. attorneys were purged because they didn’t fall into lockstep with the Republican-led agenda, and the government has secretly used a vast network of rendition to torture suspected terrorists in locales worldwide—why would this be any surprise? Too many supposedly outrageous theories of this Republican-led government have come to be true that we can’t trust the system anymore. Our justice has become completely politicized. It was probably always politicized to some degree, but I think, in the end, justice more often than not prevailed (but not always, of course). Now, you’d be naïve if you didn’t think they were looking to destroy you if you were of a different political party or held a differing opinion on any pertinent subject. The White House and its minions have spent the last six or seven years constructing a police state in the name of fighting terrorism; if you think they were upstanding and could resist the temptation of turning it on the populace in general and more specifically its political opponents, then you’re a sucker of the saddest sort.

Spitzer was an idiot for getting busted like this. It could be addiction, human failings, power, or complete arrogance that blinded him, but he should’ve known he had a bull’s eye on his back and this type of thing would end his career (not to mention the legal alarms that would go off from moving around large sums of money). I don’t condone anything he did, and his resignation, in the long run, is the best thing probably for him, the state of New York, and for his political party at both the state and national levels.

I think it’s naïve, though, to say this was just a personally corrupt governor who got snagged in his own immorality and leave it at that. I say this is a shot across the bow for all domestic political opponents—the federal government, led by the White House and its allies, have been and will continue to watch you (that includes certain Democratic presidential candidates remaining in the race). Protecting all of us against terrorism and even the immorality of prostitution (do we even need such protection from that at the federal level? I’m sure conservatives say yes) is what they might be selling us, but it’s really about political advantage and maintaining power.