I Don't Want To Be Protected. I Want To Be Free.

Sometimes I get so upset at some of the ideas I see being promoted by the right that I want to cry. Really. Literally. But I find that when I'm feeling that way, it helps to write about it. And when I'm feeling too appalled and horrified to write anything coherent, I can always just quote. That's what I'm going to do now.

This is Curt, at Flopping Aces, referring to Jim Rutenberg's NYT article about Bush getting his way on the FISA legislation [all bolding is mine]:

You have to know that Jim Rutenberg at the New York Times was spilling tear drops onto his keyboards as he wrote this:

Until last weekend, President Bush had repeatedly fallen short in seven months of battles with a Democratic-led Congress that would not give him what he wanted on immigration or education, health care or energy policy.

But the Congressional vote that authorized eavesdropping without warrants on international communications, including those involving Americans within the United States, has shown that there is at least one arena in which Mr. Bush can still hold the line: terrorism.

They have done their best to ensure that terrorism was NOT his main forte and they failed. The American people WANT us listening in on our enemy. They want our secret intelligence programs to remain secret and do their job. ...

Then, citing an article in USA Today that purports to show "that President Bush is making some headway in arguing that the increase in U.S. troops in Iraq is showing military progress," Curt writes:

The nutroots and Democrats do not understand this nor will they ever. Oh, they understand cutting and running from a tough fight quite well. But the American people want to be protected, and that means being able to project power and confidence. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Romanian head of intelligence in West Germany during the Cold War, said today, projection of power and confidence, of the ability to fight evil and see it through is what made people respect this country. ...

Curt notes, with approval,Pacepa's assertion that "... partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook":

And count the New York Times in that partisan fold. This time they failed. The leaker (I will say it again, if Thomas Tamm is the one who leaked, he should hang) tried his best to ensure a victory for the Democrats and a victory for our enemy, but failed. Neither truly understands that Americans need to know that they are protected. Not by reading the details of a secret intelligence operation but by trusting the fact that those kind of programs are going on.

I, for one, do not want to be "protected" by renouncing my constitutionally guaranteed right to speak freely and to dissent when I feel that dissent is called for. I don't want to be "protected" by a government whose idea of "protection" is stripping me of the expectation that I can make phone calls, write letters and e-mails, and pursue my interests and concerns without said government breathing down my neck and watching everything I do and say. I don't want to be "protected" by people for whom "protecting" me means treating me like an irresponsible child who cannot be trusted with important information.

But what upsets me most of all is not so much this notion of "protection" as it might affect me personally, but the fact that this idea is out there, and that it's being promoted with such an assumption of its unexceptionality. I do not believe that the American people in that global formulation want protection more than freedom. I do not believe that most Americans believe, as Curt clearly does, that protection and freedom are mutually exclusive -- that Americans have to choose between one or the other and, in his view, have chosen safety over freedom. Where I come from, that's called a devil's bargain.