Liberal Street Fighter is shocked, shocked that Bushco are totalitarians!
So, our appointed Head of State haltingly spoke to the nation last night. It’s hard to focus in on that stuttering drone, repeating the same tired catch phrases, the same weird combination of red meat for the hard right alternating with empty promises of a middle ground as he diligently works with his regime to bring back the gilded age. Eyes glazing, harder and harder to focus on that voice, that fake drawl and “aw shucks” put-on, then out leaps THIS:
A key part of that system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law and leave employers with no excuse for violating it. And by making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work in our country, we would discourage people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.
Apparently, no one in the Democratic Party picked up on this scary little sentence, nor anyone in the media. This morning is full of talk about numbers of troops and militarizing the border, but the real militarization is wrapped up in that little sentence. Combine a high-tech biometric card with the soon-to-be-required REAL ID card for us citizens, and you’ve got yourself a national ID system.
Americans, willing to wallow and quiver in fear of invading hordes, will apparently allow this country to be turned into a police state with nary a whimper, with the police and the military increasingly indistiguishable.
What are we so afraid of? It can’t really be terrorism, not in any real sense. NOTHING has been done in half a decade to secure our ports. The FBI still has disfunctional computer systems, and gets sent on wild goose chases by an NSA run amok, scooping up as many details of our everyday lives into personal databases. (Oh, and don’t expect Senator Spector to fulfill his oath to the Constitution and actually put teeth into illegal government spying on American citizens.)
While Americans continue to forget FDR’s words about giving in to debilitating fear, we get stampeded into one abrogation of our liberties after another, while corporate America can continue to fail to secure ports, trucking lines, chemical plants and refineries and power plants. Don’t worry though, they WILL get their indentured servants 2.0, with nice shiny big-brotherish ID cards.
This last five plus years has been a litany of failures. Osama bin Laden is still alive, still uncaught. This same administration failed to prevent the attack he ordered despite loud and frequent warnings. They’ve allowed a city be washed away, her citizens drowned unrescued, unaided, unmourned. They’ve done nothing to correct problems with our security apparatus, instead setting about dismantling civil liberties protections and threatening critics and the press with punitive investigations. We are arguably LESS safe than we were on September 10, 2001, mostly due to incompetence and failures, yet instead of dealing with our real problems, everybody is up in arms about the Mexican border.
What ARE some so afraid of? Could it be WHO is coming across that border? Since the right seems perfectly willing to support a party that is a wholesale failure, one has to ask. For years, the right screamed and moaned about the government taking away their guns, flying overhead with black helicopters. Pat Robertson and his ilk railed against national ID programs, likening them to the Number of the Beast. Still, though, it’s hispanics streaming north from countries decimated by US trade policies and US military and anti-drug programs that get Americans off their ass and screaming for blood, eager to surrender liberty as long as this horde is kept out.
One has to ask, is this really about security, or something … darker?
