forester, it is not necessary to make the argument that the leaders are evil. It is enough to argue that they do evil deeds. Evil deeds can and often are done by people who are otherwise good.

I wasn’t attempting to refute your ideas or trying to extend them. I just did not think it necessary to tackle the “Bush is evil” argument because I think it is irrelevant to the threshold question of unchecked executive power.

The NSA spying is dangerous because it has no oversight. It will lead to abuse - and not because the men doing the surveillance are evil. It will lead to abuse because the only people there to tell them when they have gone too far are the people doing the spying in the first place. Adrenaline will inevitably triumph over reason.

I agree with this. I also note that it presupposes that the spying is being done for a purpose — it doesn’t start as abuse, only leads that way. (If it started as abuse, then I would disagree with your premise that these leaders aren’t evil, only unchecked.)

Nice comments everyone — especially Mash.

Government intrusion and abuse of power are not always done by evil men. Unchecked power has its own logic that leads to abuse. That is why the framers rejected the idea of an unitary execute in favor of a representative govenment with inherent checks built into it by separating its functions. The NSA spying is dangerous because it has no oversight. It will lead to abuse - and not because the men doing the surveillance are evil. It will lead to abuse because the only people there to tell them when they have gone too far are the people doing the spying in the first place. Adrenaline will inevitably triumph over reason.

There are many dangers in what the NSA is doing. The one that should worry all of us is that it is being done in violation of specific laws put in the books to prevent unilateral abuse of power by the executive branch (18 U.S.C. §§3121-3127 and 50 U.S.C. §§1841-1846).

You can read my post on my site if you like about how those laws are likely being violated.

By the way, polimom, a wonderful thoughtful post, as always.

It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths some people will go to in order to convince me of a point I’ve already argued.

Well, lessee. No air travel in 1906 to be shut down. Silly statement. Businesses and schools shut down, Pearl Harbor did that. We went to war with Japan, interred the Japanese-Americans, took their property, dropped the bomb. Wait, we dropped two bombs. I won’t go into my views on some of that. But the issue Poli’s talking about, an end, was achieved.

I grew up in the era of the missile crisis. I remember the nuns piling the 4×8 tables in the lunchroom on their sides and us huddled behind them in drills just in case the Russkies dropped the bomb, which we expected would be any minute. That was surely a time of terror. I remember the fear on my parents’ faces when the Cuban missile crisis was happening. I can still see Kennedy’s face in black and white on the TV. I’m pretty sure our schools and businesses were closed that day and maybe for a couple days, but I’d have to ask my mother. I mostly remember being frightened.

In any event, we had the Cold War. Walls built, spies all over the world, the precarious balance somehow managed to hold. We went into Korea, then got out. We went into Vietnam. We all know how well that went. We even went into Iraq before this, and got out.

Now here we are. Not at war with Iraq per se, but with nameless, faceless, and more importantly, country-less enemies. Lies got us in there, and there is no exit strategy as the country gets more and more destabilized (but it’s not a civil war.)

Meanwhile back at home, the administration continues to lie and get caught in their lies, and we allow the fear of another possible attack to keep us complacent about incursions into our civil rights. Poli’s concern about the fact that it all seems so open ended is a valid one. This will all continue as long as we allow it. My fear is that by the time we say, “Hey, you guys have crossed the line!” it will be too late to do anything about it.

Doesn’t that worry you, just a little bit?

Implying that government wants to pry into our private lives, and is only using terrorism as a means to that end, seems beyond plausible. Why would Bush want to pry into my private life, independent of fighting terrorism? I’ll be honest, I just don’t see it.

Your arguments against federal incursions into privacy, etc. would be more persuasive if you assumed that the hearts of your direst enemies might be well-intentioned, though fatally misguided. The approach you take above smacks of extremism.

I agree totally, and always did, that “terrorism” isn’t a sensible enemy, and warring against a tactic is exactly why there’s no way to ever end the thing.

In fact (in the course of writing this post), I have surfaced a background thought that we really have no choice but to engage one country after another, in succession, because “terrorism” isn’t something with which we can actually engage, specifically.

My husband and I discussed this problem at length after 9/11, but for some reason, people have stopped talking about it. It was subverted by Iraq, at least by the conscious mind, but I think it’s high time we started talking about it again.