As I watched the Gonzales hearings yesterday a frightening thought occured to me. I'm sure many of you are tired of hearing the representative of the worst administration in history compare itself to men like Lincoln and FDR by using the war-time decisions made by these presidents as justification for spying on Americans without warrants. I'm sure lots of you were shaking your fists at the television, begging the senators to remind Gonzales that a perfectly legal option exists for the purposes he has claimed the program has been used for, while no such options existed for Lincoln or FDR.
But you wanna know what really worries me?
I'm not a fan of using the wrongdoings of others as jusitification for my own. You couldn't have been more than 3 years old before your parents uttered the words "2 wrongs don't make a right" for the first time, so why is it being used as a justification for the warrantless wiretaps program? Have we really dropped our standards that low? Well, yes, many of us have, but only because the argument has been dressed up in the form of precedents.
And that's the scary part. Look, none of us trust the Bush administration any further than we could spit a rat, and I'd say he's P.E. #1 if you're worried about the slippery slope this leads to. But he's only managed to get away with it this far because of the wrongdoings of the men who came before him, even if history ended up justifying their actions. What was the harm in suspending Habeus Corpus? Well, apparently about 150 years later some numbskull would live in the White House who would use Lincoln's action as a precednet to justify spying on Americans for who knows what reason.
Fast forward another 100 years. The war on terror is still going because, as we all know, it was never designed to end. And the new President, great-great-grandson of George W. Bush, is taking a hit in the polls because he's been rounding up the Quakers and executing them on the spot in the name of national security. And what does his Attorney General say in front of the Senate?
"Senator, let me remind you that no one had a problem when George W. Bush engaged in warrantless spying on American citzens."
I know there are already plenty of reasons why this program is wrong, why it should be stopped and why the men who initiated it should be thrown out of power. But this is another one to consider that has gone largely unnoticed. If Bush gets away with this it will be added to the list wrongdoings that the American people are, apparently, okay with.
Frankly I don't want anyone ever reading a list that goes something like "Lincoln, Roosevelt, Bush..."