Because You're Dull, Spying On You Is Okay

I was checking out the blog World O' Crap's very funny and very troubling "Ultimate Wingnut of 2005" contest (whose nominees include some of the leading lights of the RadCon right such as John Hindrocket and Michelle Malkin, when I clicked on a link that took me to a column by Kathleen Parker --Spies Like Us-- on Townhall.com.

The conservative columnist Kathleen Parker seeks through the trivialization of our right to privacy to justify the Bush administration's warrantless domestic spying. Her main justification is that those who have nothing to fear from government spying should have nothing to fear from government spying. She also tells us that it's better to have our embarrassingly dull lives exposed to government scrutiny than to be exposed to death by terrorism. Here's a key paragraph:

"Sometimes we might get it right and prevent another attack; sometimes we might mistakenly eavesdrop on an innocent conversation. What we save - possibly thousands of lives - compared with what we lose (mostly the exposure of our embarrassingly dull lives) would seem sufficiently self-evident to preclude the meme-driven hysteria now clotting airwaves: Bush lied; Bush spied. And, oh yes, People Died.

What's fascinating here is Kathleen Parker's temporization of the rights of Americans. I thought liberals did that. I thought conservatives had hard and fast beliefs about good and evil. I would have thought that government spying is evil -- a black deed, not a gray deed as Kathleen Parker seems to be saying. And here I thought liberals were the ones who always saw things in shades of gray.

If America is to be a moral examplar of Western civilazation -- one of the key tenets of conservatives (Remember The Lewinsky)-- then shouldn't America practice what it preaches? Especially during a war that was justified on the basis of liberation from a totalitarian regime which spied on its own citizens and intimidated its citizens through its surveillance of them?

In addition to not invading the privacy of its own citizens, the morally superior invading/liberating Bush administration should have also refrained from ignoring the rights of Iraqi citizens in the country it was invading/liberating, too. I'm referring here to the administration's justification of torture, which is an extremely serious abrogation of human rights. Previous administrations had promised never to engage in such acts, endorsing the idea that there are certain human rights which should never be violated. And once the United States was universally recognized by other countries for its absolute moral commitment to that ideal.

Kathleen Parker says she "can't muster outrage over what appears to be a reasonable action in the wake of 9/11." The problem with "resaonableness" in this case is that what one person or one organization thinks is reasonable, may only reasonably serve the interests of that individual or organization. Te problem with reasonableness as practiced by a government which engages in secret acts like executive fiats undoing privacy rights and writes secret torture memos undoing human rights is that reasonableness tends to wither in the corridors of power. The NSA thought it reasonable to spy on a vegan group, and to spy on Greenpeace. The Bush administration thought it was reasonable to suspend previous agreements on the rights of prisoners.

Democracies attempt to promote reasonableness by encouraging lots of people with different views to talk about what should and shouldn't be done. In the case of warrantless spying, for instance, by having to obtain a warrant from a judge another party would have been introduced into the decision-making process. Perhaps another kind of reason might have prevailed. In the case of the torture memo, perhaps Congress, as the representatives of the people, could have been consulted and a more reasonable course of action would have been pursued.

It also occurs to me that if Congress and the American people hadn't been disinformed by the Bush administration about Iraq's (non-existent) WMD to justify the invasion, that if there had been a truthful and reasonable national discussion of the known potentialities for anarchy and chaos in the wake of the invasion, then perhaps our national reputation as moral exemplar supreme would have remained at least somewhat inctact.

No matter how embarrassingly dull our lives, the obdurateness of prisoners, or the real facts about WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration does not have the right to unilaterally decide what's best for us. Nor does have the right to torture prisonders, or to manufacture intelligence to support its invasion plans. These acts are immoral and anti-democratic. If Kathleen Parker is truly on the side of due process as she claims, which in a democracy means lots of people have a say in that process, her trivialization of these rights is truly troubling. Another quote from the column:

"In theory, I don't want to be wiretapped without due process, no matter how unlikely it is that anyone would want to know the shade of my highlights."

We have certainly come a long way from the American conservative movement of the 50s and 60s which used to warn of the fearsome power of the State, whether totalitarian or liberal. Now conservatives apparently support a surveillance state, believing that because they control the state they have the best interests of its citizens at heart. The benevolent state -- that would have been a real stretch for conservatives like William F. Buckley back in 50s and 60s.

Particularly ironic then is that Kathleen Parker is director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina, founded by Reid Buckley, William F. Buckley's brother. Apparently the Old Model Conservative who used to fear the power of the "State" was replaced once the insurgency took over the reins of power. How remarakable that the New Model Conservative now sees the State as a benevolent surveillor of its embarrassingly dull citizens, a role it must take up to protect them against the communists -- oops, I meant terrorists.

The supposedly New Model conservative apologists like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks (on the NewsHour last week) justify their temporization of the right to privacy by advancing the notion that the terror threat constitutes a brave new set of circumstances which requires that rights be trampled because there is a new set of circumstances which require that rights be trampled because the terror threat …etc., etc., etc.

What is particularly ironic here is that in the 50s and 60s the threat of total nuclear annihilation was much more real and immediate, with circumstances that were truly unique. We were told that Russian spies were everywhere. It was a time of one of modern U.S. conservatism's great early triumphs -- the House Un-Aemrican Activities Committee presided over by McCarthy and ably assisted by a young William F. Buckley, Jr. What seems clear is that those with authoritarian bent, whether New or Old Models, although they claim otherwise, can always find a new "unique" set of circumstances to justify that the U.S. spy on its citizens.

Did the NSA spy on Kathleen Parker, I wonder? Or Mr. Brooks? Probably not. As New/Old Model conservative apologists, I somehow doubt they represent much of a threat to the State.