'Cause the Vandals took the Handles

Watching it happen is pretty bad.

The Internet version--watching a comment thread scroll down--is about the same.

And while there were no real surprises, there was still that deadening feeling of none of the last minute saves, the happy surprises, Han Solo coming out of the starlight with a wah-hoo--nobody woke up. Nobody snapped at the last moment, no million-to-one shot  came through. Just the old ugly process of historical dialectic without the sugar of miracles.

Just another cave-in where there didn't have to be one.

If there's one thing about the blather-splattering actuality that's particularly noisome, it's the flat-out lying on a thing like FISA--that isn't even meant to be real argument. It's meant as static, as fog, as throwing laundry detergent in the face of the knife-wielding maniac (us, The Left) so they can get away. We have to clutch our eyes and roar--and by then the bill has passed--and there's nothing you can do about it unless you want John McCain as President.

I'm proud that my other Senator, Dick Durbin, voted against it. I'm proud that Hillary Clinton stood with the filibusterers. I'm glad that the ACLU  and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have stood up to fight. It reminds me of the Poles and their national anthem, "Poland is not yet lost."

Takes one's mind off of the broken parts.

They're not newly broken: the fact of laws bent to excuse the powerful and steal from the powerless is at least as old as the 3/5 human beings in the constitution. And the fight is at least as old as the first sentences of the Declaration of Independence--as old as "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." And people who say and even believe they share our interests fucking us? Really?

I was always concerned about my friends who were saying, "I'm really excited about Barack Obama," not because I had personal distrust of the guy, but that it's just bad, bad, bad in principle, and it gives me no joy to find out I was right. My personal misgivings stood up and saluted when he mentioned the 'crisis' of Social Security, when it was not only clear that there is no crisis--there's only one under the absolute worst assumptions of economic growth and population--and that trope is the battle-cry of the privatizers. From then on my support was guarded--as was my concern. The criterion for following a leader should ever and only be, not that he's handsome, or smart, or passionate--but that we know where he's going and agree with it. 

But here, now, today, there are these things that are not allowed to be said:

1. There is no operational advantage in dispensing with warrants. None. There is no action the government is restricted from by demanding that a warrant be issued. None.  Well, there are, but those would be spying on political opponents, or people that have nothing to do with the war on terror, and using the data for political or plain blackmail--like, oh, forcing them to vote for a bad law contrary to their own interests. There has been no argument made that warrants inhibit a specific action: they just want it.

2. There is no deadline. FISA was, is, and shall remain in effect. The only deadline is the expiration of the tenure of a series of clamshell attorneys-general, and the advent of people unsympathetic to the cause of letting Republicans get away with felonies. 

3. There is no electoral upside to excusing the telecoms. As Godfrey Cambridge of blessed memory pointed out, nobody likes the phone company. Congress cutting special deals for them pleases just about none of the electorate. Not even (or especially not) stockholders. Not nobody, not nohow. 

4. Only 30 Senators even knew what they were excusing. 70 Senators had not even been briefed about the program they're protecting and granting civil immunity to. They don't know what it is, but they approve of it. An altar to Cthulhu? Yore spellcheck's broken, son, but I'm in! 

Time and again, the Republicans have sought to give themselves immunity from prosecution, even as they seek to deny their opponents access to those same courts. They have to do this stuff for the safety of the country--but don't want to have to prove it to anybody. They know that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are dangerous terrorists--but don't want to have to prove it to anybody. Immunity from prosecution for any contractor in Iraq. Blackwater mercenaries neither under the Uniform Code of Military Justice , Iraqi Law, or United States Law. Guantanamo is not in the United States, so American Law doesn't apply. It is in Cuba, but Cuban Law doesn't apply either. The office of the Vice President is not in the Executive Branch, nor is it in the Legislative Branch, but in the hitherto unsuspected Forbidden City branch of the government. 

This is not just an attempt to destroy the Fourth Amendment; It's not just an assault on the rule of law and the idea that two separate justices is no justice at all: it  is the voice of an old Enemy  saying "You shall be denied the truth, lest the truth make you free." 

And in the same way this isn't that Barack Obama has  shifted his position on something us raving lefties  feel is important; it's not that he's allied himself with the powerful and assumes the loyalty of the rest; it's that the part of truth, of accountability, and of equal justice under law is such a vital part that, without it in working order, America will simply not recover, will not rise out of this trench we're in.

And I think that it's imperative that Barack Obama not just change his position on this bad law: not just that he restore the Fourth Amendment: but that he see that, unless this vital part be fixed, he will take command of a huge machine that does not go and does not work. 

So that a traveller might come upon it half-buried in the desert of Iraq, and read its plaque: "I am the United States of America, the only superpower left in the world! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"