http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/Who are they? They're all around you. They might be eating dinner in the same restaurant as you, buying the same brand of ketchup and even watching the same TV shows you do. But there's a terrible difference. They are that hideous brand of Enemy of the State known as "The Extremist".
After 8 years of wailing and doomsaying, of dragging out the corpse of Orwell and parading him around to claim that the Bush Administration's War on Terror was nothing short of a brutal tyranny that violated the law and the Constitution-- the Obama Administration is rolling back the clock eight years and tossing out any pesky civil rights issues in order to fight the real enemy, "extremists".
Naturally "former veterans" top the list as potential extremists, probably because like most "extremists" they're highly likely to vote for Republicans. And by now anyone who lived through 8 years of the Clinton Administration knows that when the left talks about "extremists", they mean people who would never for for them or support their agenda.
The fundamental difference between the Bush Administration and Republicans in general is that when they talk about "dangerous extremists", they mean foreign terrorists. When the Obama Administration and left wing Democrats talk about "dangerous extremists", they usually mean people who think taxes are too high. If there's a better bellwether of the difference between national defense and national tyranny.
The Bush Administration viewed people who wanted to massacre Americans as the major extremist threat. The Obama Administration views people who question their tax and spend policies as the major extremist threat.
That made the noxious hypocrisy in which Democrats, the press and assorted liberals spent the last 8 years screaming that we're living in a tyrannical state with no civil liberties-- all the more foul.
Under the Clinton Administration, we saw the military used against American citizens in violation of the Posse Comitatus act. We saw talk show hosts in the political opposition accused of responsibility for terrorist attacks. We saw a man dragged through the mud and tried in the press for a bombing he was never responsible for, while the foreign terrorists responsible for the original bombing of the World Trade Center got a virtual free pass... leading in to 9/11. We saw border police armed with machine guns storming the home of an immigrant's private residence, kidnapping a young boy at gunpoint and deporting him to a brutal totalitarian regime.
We also saw the use of roving wiretaps, secret evidence and a wide variety of tools given to the Federal government, that Janet Reno and Eric Holder repeatedly abused. And now those same folks are back in the driver's seat and working hard on their enemies lists.
And naturally the civil liberties people have nothing to say on the subject. Because the targets are "extremists", by which we naturally mean people who don't read the New York Times or listen to NPR or get their news from DailyKos or Katie Couric.
The same people who found Bush's tactics in the name of national defense to be tyrannical, are all for Obama's war against his political opposition-- whether it's organizing smear campaigns out of the White House targeting his remaining media critics or working to criminalize his grass roots opposition.
As the Obama Administration works to define the War on Terror down from fighting overseas terrorist groups to fighting generic extremists, who will naturally turn out to be members of his own political opposition, we can see how national defense becomes sacrificed to national tyranny in the name of appeasement and outright treason.
And now suddenly the same brave defenders of the Constitution for the last 8 years, nod along and say that, yes maybe the Constitution needs some updating. And perhaps it's time for an age limit for Supreme Court justices. And naturally the government needs to monitor and take action against "extremist" groups.
After all if thinking for yourself, instead of letting the New York Times think for you isn't a crime-- maybe it should be.
