Electoral Tsunami, Name of Wiretapping

Meandered across to the DarkSide™ just to see what flavor Kool-Ade™ they were regaling themselves with this Holiday™ winterim week. Wore some brand-spank-new Christmas™ Asbestos Underwear™ just for safety. Over at redstate.org the level of discussion, overflowing as it was with a ripe expectoration compounded equally of froth, snottiness and spittle, was nonetheless refreshingly naïve. Without undue injustice to their rhetorical sophistication and logical prowess, their dominant theme appeared to be,

"The Dear Leader™ Preznit™ CAN SO do anything he chooses, and only those lying unprincipled ignorant treasonous Democrat self-hating media lesbo-liberal faggot unpatriotic hippie Commie bedwetter dopefiend pinko limp-membered dry-pudenda’d Osama-lovers™ think anything that is even slightly deviant, and we do mean deviant, from this warm, comforting, indispensible truth."

Almost immediately in reaction came the reminder that Katrina has eviscerated any black-vote inroads by the Republicans for a generation, just as the Tex-Mexi-Cali-Zona border-sealing crazies are determined to do to the Hispanic vote next year. And the Republicans are not going to have anything in 2006 to turn out the Newt Reichgt Crypto-Christian Taliban™ with, whereas black folks won’t be forgetting Katrina by then, if ever.

Up against the coming year's worth of daily reminders of the Administration's default policies of Lying, Spying, Torture and Corruption, the Mighty Wurlitzer™ Republican Noise Machine's flaccid, detumescent standbys of God, guts, gays, and guns are going to fail – not with a bang, but with a whimper.

It’s as if these folks have been living on a barrier island for a generation, and they have barely even begun to process the fact that the tide has just receded from the beaches. They’re still blithely sipping piña coladas in the bright sunlight. The inevitable “WTF, MF?” has still not yet formed in their addled and agitated brains, much less on their immaculately unknowing lips.

But the tsunami is coming, O ye children of the Republicans, the tsunami is coming. After it, everything in your precariously built environment is going to be stove in, blown away, sunk, shattered, battered, flattened, crushed, pulverised, macerated, and otherwise utterly devastated. For this electoral tsunami’s name is Warrantless Wiretapping.

Except for those increasingly few agonized souls who are galvanically stimulated by Faux News' electrical attachment to their gonads, Support Our Troops By Continuing to Kill Them was pretty much inert and torpid as a rallying cry by about the second week of Cindy Sheehan's Crawford TX sit-in this summer. Then the Hon. John Murtha drove a stake through its wretched heart in November. Sure, the House and Senate majorities haven't gotten the memo, nor have those bright, brainlocked sparks over at the DLC. And yeah, the Preznit's numbers are up for a while. But not by much, not for long, and not for real.

The amount of energy, capital, attention and focus that they are now going to have to put into the It Wasn't Illegal, It Was Just Convenient position (including sliming the opposition as favoring terrorists) is formidable. But these are real good grounds for progressives to fight the wingnuts on. In addition to being right on the Constitutional issue of legislative superiority over the executive even in wartime, for once we happen to be on the popular side as well.

The moment for getting public and Congressional approval of warrantless wiretaps was about 4 years ago – say, 9/12. However, if you're the Preznit and you didn't get it done then – but acted for more than 1,500 days like you had – your exposed, flapping cojones tremble between a rock and a hard place.

The Preznit might just barely get Congressional approval yet, if he could bring himself to ask for it. Mercifully, his stubborn and unbending dedication to his own will precludes such an easy answer. And it might not even be that easy, as the one-month-only extension vote on the Patriot Act showed. However, it is arduous to conceive of the successful PR and scare operation, four years later, that would result in public approval. Not to say they won't try, with all the kazoos and clowns at their disposal.

The cultural cold-warriors delude themselves that the people are already convinced of the rightness of Vietnam and the wrongness of the anti-war opposition, then and now. Well, here be dragons at the corner of their cultural map. People haven't forgotten Nixon's spying on domestic political opponents under the guise of national security. In fact, it's what he's famous for. A certain readiness to believe that it's happening again can already be detected, not just among the professionally progressive paranoid but out in regular America too. And no amount of soothing national security noises is going to work this time.

Once the inevitable hearings get underway and the breadth of the breathtaking Preznitial usurpation of power becomes clearer – together with the popular revulsion at both their tactics and their supposed justifications – the streets are going to be full of running Republicans headed for the hills. However, the coming electoral tsunami is a hundred-year event, with all the destruction to the status quo entailed therein. Ain't no mountain high enough for the pathetic denizens of the Republican barrier island.