More head-shaking… but with an optimistic ending

Well, the news today on the Feingold thing is pretty amusing, in a “laugh so I don’t cry” way. Democrats are literally scampering for cover, and avoiding the question, in an attempt to avoid upsetting people. I know it’s been said almost to death, but they are never going to amount to anything until they stand for something.

Here’s snippets from a couple of the stories today covering this:

First, from WaPo we’ve got The Feingold Resolution and the Sound of Silence

Many of Feingold’s Democratic colleagues agree that Bush abused his authority with the NSA spying program. And they know liberal Democratic activists are eager to see Bush censured, or worse. But they also know Feingold’s maneuver could cost them seats in GOP states.

Hence the elaborate efforts to avoid comment. Five Democratic senators called a news conference yesterday to talk about the Bush budget’s “dangerously irresponsible priorities” — but three of them fled the room before allowing questions

Note: the question of legality and/or ethics: not relevant.

Next up, AP via Yahoo brings us Feingold Accuses Democrats of ‘Cowering’:

“Democrats run and hide” when the administration invokes the war on terrorism, Feingold told reporters.

Feingold introduced censure legislation Monday in the Senate but not a single Democrat has embraced it. Several have said they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.

I kind of agree with Matt Stover on this, generally:

Astonishingly enough, the main response from the Republican leadership (specifically, Dr. Bill “I’ve seen the videotape and in my medical opinion she’s conscious” Frist) was they they couldn’t support the motion on the grounds that — and this is a direct quote — “it would send the wrong signal around the world.”

This is the man, by the way, who wants to be the next Republican President of the United States.

None of these idiots seems to comprehend that invading a nation which has not attacked us, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians (the current best estimate, which our Pentagon continues to suppress, is 25-30,000 Iraqi civilians died in the actual fighting, and the bump in overall death rate from all factors, comparing pre- and post-invasion, suggests that the invasion of Iraq was responsible, by the end of 2004, for 130,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. And we wonder why they hate us . . .), kidnapping innocent citizens of friendly nations and shipping them off without trial or even the faintest shred of evidentiary review to be tortured — not to mention maintaining our own officially-sanctioned torture chambers in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, and having an executive banch of government (Constitutionally charged with enforcing the our nation’s laws) openly declaring that our nation’s law does not apply to them . . .

I mean, how much more wrong can our fucking signals get?

That’s Matthew “Heroes Die“, “Blade of Tyshalle” Stover, in case you weren’t clued in.

While almost the entire government seems to be unworried about Bush and his illegal spying–apparently on the grounds that, you know, he says it’s only done on people who are in with terrorists, the ACLU is proving that the FBI is already doing surveillance on people just because they opposed the war in Iraq:

Two documents released today reveal that the FBI investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice just because the organization opposed the war in Iraq. Although previously disclosed documents show that the FBI is retaining files on anti-war groups, these documents are the first to show conclusively that the rationale for FBI targeting is the group’s opposition to the war.

And, of course, at the same time the courts have decided to allow the government’s fishing expedition into Google’s records. If the courts are going to allow the government to subpeona private information just to look at it and see if they can find something they like, without requiring a reasonable basis for the search, why does the administration need to keep going ahead without warrants?

The only good news today is that no matter how spineless the Democrats in government are, the message is still getting through to the American people.

Scalzi points to the new poll, which you can read all about–the short version is that more and more people are beginning to see what we’ve seen all along.

Here’s my favourite bit: