Three-Toed Sloth

"I Deeply Resent The Way This Administration Makes Me Feel Like a Nutbar Conspiacy Theorist"

But I don't know how else to feel, when dubiously legal and definitely undemocratic programs of spying on domestic political dissenters get shopped to private companies through a profoundly corrupt contracting process, and records conveniently disappear without causing any official comment. (Via Laura Rozen, who has been following this story from the beginning.) — The really depressing thing is that even if, inshallah, the GOP loses the White House, and doesn't gain the House or the Senate, in 2008, it's not clear how much of this will change. If the last sixty years of the military-indutrial complex is anything to go by, the rapidly-growing espionage-industrial complex of spooks and contractors will be very hard indeed to uproot. Wasting money on jets and battle-ships for never-going-to-happen wars is one thing, and might even be excused as Keynesianism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, but making money out of classifying peaceful political opponents of the current administration as enemies of the state seems, not put too fine a point on it, like a danger to the republic.

Further scenes of your semi-privatized national surveillance state at work:

• Stay alert! There are fantasies of being "the person who is tough enough to do all those dirty things that have to be done while other people just wring their hands and whimper" to preserve, not to mention human lives to mangle and a national honor to stain.
• Trust no one!
• Keep your blacklist handy! Remember, there's no such thing as a false positive!

(Updated 11 July to fix sloppy phrasing about the upcoming elections; thanks to "shelby" at Crooked Timber for pointing this out.)

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